The proposed national budget for the financial year 2023/24 in Uganda has raised concerns among health and political activists, as well as legislators, due to reduced allocations for the health and social development sectors.
While the budget amount has increased to Shillings 52 trillion, a rise of four trillion Shillings from the previous year, the health sector has seen a decrease in funding from Shillings 4.7 trillion to Shillings 4.2 trillion.
The gender unit also faces a significant decrease in funding, with the allocation dropping to its lowest level since the 2019/20 budget.
This reduction in health sector funding has alarmed activists and experts who anticipate problems in the delivery of health services. Patricia Munaabi, the Executive Director of Forum for Women in Democracy, highlights a projected shortage of 181.6 billion Shillings in the health sub-program, particularly affecting regional referral hospitals, which will face a reduction of Shillings 25.5 billion.
Munaabi emphasizes that these cuts exacerbate existing gaps in the health system, such as staffing and inadequate supplies. The budget framework paper reveals a cut of Shillings 3.483 billion in the wage bill for primary health care, worsening the human resource crisis and issues like the non-deployment of medical pre-interns and salary delays.
Munaabi also points out that women and girls, who heavily rely on public health facilities, will be disproportionately affected by the budget cuts.
There has been a slight increase in the budget allocation for gender-based violence response to 161 million shillings.
Munaabi says this remains insufficient compared to the scale of the problem. Although there has been a slight increase in the budget allocation for gender-based violence (GBV) response, Munaabi believes it remains insufficient compared to the scale of the problem.
“While we applaud the slight increment in the budget for the response to GBV from Shillings 100 million to 161 million, the amount allocated remains dismal compared to the outlined needs. According to the Ministry of Gender, the male involvement strategy for combating GBV, alone needs an average of 3 billion Shillings per financial year,” Munaabi says.
Peter Echeru from the Center for Health, Human Rights, and Development warns against cutting the health budget, citing the critical issue of blood supply contributing to maternal deaths.
He mentions that about 41 percent of maternal deaths result from the lack of blood. While the blood collection allocation has increased to 23 billion from 18 billion shillings, Echeru highlights the need for sustained efforts to address this issue.
“For this ending financial year, the increase in the blood collection allocation from has already made a change in this area, because now the number of mothers dying due to lack of blood has dropped by one percentage point before even the year ends,” he said.
While the budget is set to be read the following day, there is still the possibility of advocating for changes through supplementary budgets.
“The budget processes have been affected by a shift from sector budget to program budgeting, because when you look at the human resource development program, all the issues affecting vulnerable people were bundled in there, and yet there could be a giant sector that could take most of the money. Even when we were discussing the budget, the speaker was also asking are we going to discuss and analyze this budget by sector or by program,” Kabahenda says.
Flavia Nabagabe, a member of parliament, mentions that the opposition has engaged in discussions and presented a minority report outlining their recommended budget adjustments.
ends