FOR a visitor, the sights of Paris, the French capital, are a pleasure to behold. Ancient architecture competes with modern structures and spectacular aesthetics to earn Paris its reputation as one of Europe’s most beautiful cities. However, that was the last thing on the mind of the governor of Kwara State, Dr Abdulfatah Ahmed, as he stepped into Paris on a cold October 7 morning.  Rather, the Executive Governor of Kwara State was focused on the Kwara State Community Health Insurance Scheme (KCHIS) which had been nominated along with nine other development initiatives for the first Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) Award for taking development initiatives to scale.

In the run up to the event, Erik Solheim, Chair of DAC, said although extreme poverty had been halved and progress made on MDG Goals, more innovative solutions needed to be taken to scale if  “we are to end poverty, green our economies and to make sure that all the children now going to school now learn something.” It was an issue Ahmed would latch on to and escalate the following day at the globally renowned OECD New World Forum which dwelt on fresh pathways to Africa’s growth.

Back to the DAC awards, Ahmed’s enthusiasm was understandable. In seven years, KCHIS has provided 85, 000 rural dwellers in Kwara State access to subsidised basic health care in 10 of the 16 local government areas of the state. The scheme, which provides participants access to basic healthcare for a year, started in Edu Local Government Area in 2007. The Ahmed-led administration has now extended it to 10 local governments, according to Professor Babatunde Opabola, the Senior Special Assistant on Primary Health.

Clearly, the simplicity, impact, and affordability of the scheme did not go unnoticed. The scheme had already received accolades from the Bill Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon. The 34-member OECD had also taken notice of the innovative scheme.

To underscore the importance of the occasion, Governor Ahmed’s predecessor in office, Senator Bukola Saraki, had also arrived Paris to be part of Kwara State’s moment of glory. Not only was the scheme initiated in his tenure, Saraki was clearly pleased that his successor had scaled up the initiative and garnered it global acclaim.

Perhaps, to underscore the scheme’s importance and guarantee credibility, the DAC jury was highly credentialed and global. Headed by H. E. Lubna Bit Khalid Al Qasimi, United Arab Emirate (UAE)’s Minister for International Development and Cooperation, the panel also included K. Y. Amoako, President, African Center For Economic Transformation; Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow and Deputy Director for the Global Economy and Development, Brookings Institution, Washington; Geoff Lamb, Chief Economic and Policy Advisor to the Co-Chairs and CEO, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and Dato Lee Yee Cheong, Chairman, International  Science Technology and Innovative Center for South-South Cooperation (STIC), Malaysia. Others are Rt. Hon. Andrew Mitchell, MP House of Commons, UK; Charlotte Petri-Gornitzka, DG, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA); and Julius Akinyemi, Resident Entrepreneur, Massachusetts Institute Of Technology Media Lab.

Diplomats and development experts attended the award ceremony, which took place at the OECD’s gleaming headquarters in Paris, from Europe, Asia, and Africa, including Christian Rebergen, Director General, International Cooperation, Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Petri-Gornitzka, DG of SIDA, set the ball rolling by introducing the finalists. Apart from KCHIS, initiatives from India, Kenya, Nepal, South Africa, Bangladesh and Pakistan were also shortlisted for the DAC Award. Although, Katalyst, a scheme that provides high-quality seeds to Bangladeshi farmers as a means of helping to increase their income, won the overall prize, KCHIS managed to share the limelight with the DAC 2014 winner.

Indeed, jury member, the SIDA DG, felt compelled to acknowledge this given the attention and accolades KCHIS received in the run up to the main event as well as events that preceded it. For instance, at the breakfast meeting with representatives from the UK, Germany, Netherlands and the World Health Organization (WHO), the Kwara delegation, led by Ahmed and Saraki, received commendations from the European countries and the global health body for being the only country in Africa to have taken community health insurance to scale. The Kwara delegation’s enthusiasm about DAC was, therefore, understandable.

Petri-Gornitzka told the audience that she knew there was a lot of enthusiasm for KCHIS given it’s the only subsidised scheme that has been taken to scale in the world but that Katalayst’s intervention had reached 458,000 people, the highest impact among the 10 initiatives that made the OECD shortlist.

Nevertheless, she assured, Kwara’s finalist prize was also laudable, given that it was shortlisted among close to 50 entries. Indeed, Pieter Walhof, Director, PharmAccess Foundation, one of Kwara’s KCHIS partners, told an earlier meeting that the scheme was so innovative that the World Economic Forum had selected Kwara State as a model for other states, a call that Kaduna and Ogun states had responded to as they are currently understudying the Kwara model with a view to implementing it.

Receiving the finalist prize for taking KCHIS to scale in Kwara State, Governor Ahmed said “we are very delighted to be here today because we have gained this recognition, despite our resource challenges. It is, therefore, very encouraging to us that we have won this prize. In Kwara State, we have always prioritised healthcare, based on the premise that only a healthy populace can be productive. That is why we collaborated with the Dutch government and PharmAccess to initiate this scheme that has grown from 10 participants in 2007 to 85, 000 today. 

“I must thank my predecessor, Senator Bukola Saraki, who is here with us, for his foresight in starting this project. We also appreciate the support of the Dutch government and other donor partners. Our target is universal coverage of all one million rural dwellers in the state by 2018. This is why we look forward to others partnering with us in this direction.”

As is usual with ceremonies of this nature, the awards were followed by a well-attended dinner in one of the OECD’s impressive halls.  As the team from Kwara retired for the night, the delights of Paris were still not strong enough to distract from the following afternoon’s event.

The following afternoon, Governor Ahmed was the only Nigerian on a panel discussion at the OECD’S New World Forum which discussed Africa’s future developmental prospects. Themed ‘Africa: The Future is Now,’ it explored, among others, whether Africa is taking off in general or through isolated cases.

It also explored the champions and engines of success in Africa, while also interrogating obstacles to growth and the place of the middle class in providing sustainable development.

Other panel members were Moncef Cheikh-Rouhou, Professor and member of the Tunisian Parliament; Professor Achille Mbembe of Witwatersrand University, South Africa; Magette Wade, founder and CEO of Tiossan, Senegal; and Lionel Zinsou, chairman of PAI Partners, France. Given the forum and its topic of discussion, the world media was well represented with Cable News Network (CNN), the Financial Times (FT), Le Point and La Republica being in attendance.

Ahmed was blunt and straight to the point. Functional education is the key to Africa’s future. To succeed, Africa must decouple itself from an educational system that remains shackled to the needs of colonialism more than five decades after. For Ahmed, a graphic manifestation of this dysfunction in African education is that an African child has a six per cent chance of making it to tertiary education, while his European counterpart has an above 80 per cent chance. Ahmed said while he had no intention of excusing the violent insurgencies that were threatening to blight the future of Africa, the lack of appropriate education and opportunities for youths, he opined, contributed to Africa’s stagnation and violent strife. This has resulted in the continent having the highest number of internally-displaced people, a huge number of unemployable youths and a significant number of out of school children.

The solution, he said, was to review the content and context of African education. Infrastructure is key in this regard, Ahmed admitted, but more important is educational content skewed towards the continent’s identified needs in science, technology and entrepreneurship.

These, he said, can ensure that every child is equipped to innovate and contribute to the country’s developmental objectives while achieving their own aspirations. Referring to Kwara, he said the state government was already pursuing this by focusing on entrepreneurial education at the state-owned university and by collaborating with City and Guilds of London to establish a groundbreaking International Vocation Centre to plug gaps in middle-level manpower. 

Other contributions keyed into the need for an educational system that is designed to meet Africa’s development and the urgent need to promote entrepreneurship to provide jobs, grow Africa’s middle class and contribute to its growth.

Clearly, Ahmed’s contribution had connected with the OECD’s call for better education for African children as the key to its future. More importantly, Kwara State’s innovative KCHIS and its leadership’s vision for state and continent earned it acclaim and applause in far away Paris. In the end, missing the delights of Paris proved worthwhile.

Akorede is Senior Special Assistant (SSA), Media, to Governor Abdulfatah Ahmed of Kwara State.