Nigeria has
been ineffective in providing quality social sector services to
the people. The results are high child and maternal morbidity and
mortality, low levels of adult literacy and poor academic performance,
and high fertility that translates into rapid and unsustainable
population growth. Availability and use of affordable child survival
and maternal health measures is appallingly low. At least 15 percent
of Nigerian children will die before their fifth birthday, while
a Nigerian woman dies every three minutes from causes related to
pregnancy and childbirth. Adult literacy actually declined during
the decade of the 1990s, and fewer than 60 percent of children are
in school. |
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Fertility
is high, birth intervals are short, and contraceptive prevalence
is low. Health and education indicators are much worse in northern
Nigeria than in the rest of the country, demonstrating regional
imbalance and inequity. The poor quality of education, coupled with
lack of access, is encapsulating successive generations of the poor
deeper and deeper into poverty.
Key constraints to the use of social sector
services in Nigeria include their poor quality and lack of accessibility.
In some areas of the country, there is constricted demand, and there
is also a strong need for an improved policy environment, given
the extremely low resource levels allocated to health and education
in the Federal budget. The powerful linkages between health and
education indicators argue for the strategic integration of programs
in reproductive health and family planning, child survival and basic
education where feasible and practical. This SO will use performance
measures such as school persistence, immunization rates, and contraceptive
prevalence. Targets are provisional, pending receipt of data from
the 2003 NDHS. |
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