Impact of Institutional Quality on Multilateral Aid in Nigeria

The linkage between quality of institutions and economic performance of nations has generated a lot of interest among scholars, due to their influence on development of many countries and effective use of resources including foreign aid from multilateral organizations. Two strands of theories emerge on the institutions-multilateral aids nexus: those for benefits of aid to growth and development; and those for harms caused by aid. The research objective is to investigate the impact of institutional quality on multilateral aid in Nigeria. To do this, the study applied auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach. Data for the study were sourced from the ICRG data, WGI data, QoG database, Transparency International, and World Development Indicators (WDI). The findings show that institutional quality variables do not have any influence on the multilateral aid in Nigeria, except the ‘independence of judiciary’ which appeared statistically significant. In the short-run analysis, the disequilibrium in the long-run equilibrium is corrected for in the next quarter period by about 25%; almost all the variables are statistically and significantly influencing multilateral aid. It is therefore recommended that donor agencies should consider other factors that negatively influence official development assistance (ODA) such as politics, location and colonial history

Primary Health Care under One Roof: Knowledge and Predictors among Primary Health Care Workers in Enugu State, South East, Nigeria

Background: The concept of “Primary Health Care Under One Roof” (PHCUOR) is a new governance reform to improve primary health care (PHC) implementation and integration. This study aimed at assessing the level of knowledge of this concept and its predictors among PHC Workers. Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional descriptive study of PHC workers in Enugu State. Respondents were selected using systematic sampling method. Data were collected with self-administered questionnaire and analyzed using IBM-SPSS version 25. Levelof statistical significance was set at 5% and confidence interval (CI) of 95%. Results: A total of 292 responses out of 337 questionnaires were retrieved, giving a response rate of 86.6%. Majority of the respondents were female (257, 88.0%) and greater than half were in the age range of 41–50 years (151, 51.7%). Most of the respondents had overall good knowledge of PHCUOR (210, 71.9%) but there was poor understanding of some concepts. Bivariate analysis showed that having good knowledge of PHCUOR was associated with duration of practice (χ2= 6.013, P = 0.018) and age (χ2 = 4.495, P = 0.036) but on binary logistic regression, males were found to be 2.8 times more likely to have good knowledge of the concept compared to females (adjusted odds ratio = 2.763.; 95% CI = 1.022–7.469, P = 0.045). Conclusion: There was overall good knowledge of PHCUOR but the knowledge of rationale, gateway, and minimum service package (MSP) was poor. Males were approximately 2.8 times more likely to have good knowledge compared to females. Regular training of PHC workers on the concepts of PHCUOR especially the rationale, gateway, and MSP is needed to improve their knowledge and service delivery. Keywords: Enugu, knowledge, predictors, primary health care under one roof&nbsp