Providing funds for health is a requisite for achieving a healthy citizenry. However, budgeting for the health sector in any State in the country, without some form of monitoring of its performance, will not achieve the desired effect of a healthy populace.One of the ways of monitoring the performance of the budget is through a scorecard and in this case a budget scorecard. It is a monitoring tool that can be used to elicit social and public accountability and also increase the responsiveness of service providers and policy makers, among others.To this end, the Bauchi State Accountability Mechanism for Maternal and Newborn Health (BaSAM) produced the Bauchi State 2015 Health Budget Scorecard. It assessed four distinct areas of Transparency, Participation, Adequate Resource Allocation and Budget Release for key agencies delivering Maternal and Newborn Health (MNH) in Bauchi State.View/download the scorecard here
To encourage proper use of money budgeted to health, we use scorecards as a monitoring tool to understand budgeting process, its openness and implementation to elicit accountability. This budget scorecard highlights needed areas of improvement to have an effective health budget in Bauchi State.