FG needs about $66bn to fix public health across the country — HealthCap Expert
By Matthew Denis
Dr Ola Brown, Founding partner of Healthcare Capital Africa also known as ‘Healthcap;’ a pan-Africa investment company has disclosed that Nigeria government needs an estimate sum of $66billion to fix the public healthcare Sector across the four walls of the country.
She made the disclosure as one of the panelists at the 16th Annual Conference of Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria (CIBN) held at Abuja.
Speaking on the condition of public healthcare she said, “When we are looking at the healthcare projection we have done Public Private Partnership in Africa as one of the biggest issues in infrastructure is being able to grow that reputation and trust within the international capital market and once we are able to do that we will see interest rate come down and projects becomes more attractive.
“Hospitals, diagnostic centres and public healthcare facilities across the country are in dilapidated stage and the estimate is about $66billion of the gap required to fix the healthcare.”
According to her, “When people talk about the healthcare we actually don’t understand what healthcare means and it’s not limited to making people healthy.
“There is a huge multiplying effect when you invest in healthcare. If you look at every state of America, healthcare and education are the biggest public providers and biggest employers. If you look at UK Healthcare is the largest employers renewal and the sixth biggest employer in the world.
“So when we start to think about healthcare as not just making everybody healthy so that they can work but we are thinking about a huge generation of employment and healthcare is leading in this feat.
“And when we think about manufacturing, for instance, focusing on the biggest companies in America like the United Healthcare group which is the healthcare insurance company with multisector actually has a hired marketers so healthcare is big business if we invest in it and have the right structural perspective.”
Dr. Brown pointed out that it will actually cost about $50million in getting all the teaching hospitals in Nigeria to meet global standard.
The Expert said, “We could get every single hospital in Nigeria to global standard because when you think of the uptakes agreement you still have patients that are willing to pay for healthcare because they need healthcare at a time.
“People are less concerned to pay for power because they will find alternative way around it but they are willing to pay for Healthcare. So the Guarantee put in place for Healthcare projects will be a lot of benefits but you will look at the risks.
Dr. Ola Brown who is also the founder of the Flying Doctors Healthcare Investment Company (FDHIC) while speaking about equity, said that Nigeria is very dead centric market which back to risk perspective and the capital in the country.
“For every single person here has mentioned the power of equity and the power of ownership to drive health projects. I think it’s very important we can start thinking about equity into the PPP, concession project. People don’t like investing in projects where there is a possibility that they will lose all their money.
She suggested, “It’s very important as private sector, investors, bankers and people that are involved in capital market as well to really think about how we can make government where they are because one of the reasons why a lot of Public Private Partnership hasn’t taken off is because there’s a gap on people that want it to make profit and people that don’t want to make profit at all.
“And the more that we can meet government in the middle and make this conversation to say you guys don’t have the money we can come in, but put in the policies in place, guarantee in place to allow us to use our capital to take some of the risks away things will be more better to attract more investors.”
Dr. Brown suggested that we should work on the African risk premium to let the international market know that we will do what we’re supposed to do by moving Nigeria reputation positively before the global market.
