The Obama administration is expected to propose in its fiscal 2011 budget Monday new funding to combat preventable and tropical diseases, malnutrition and other conditions afflicting the world's poor, as part of a strategy to broaden its approach to global health.
The new policy, details of which the administration plans to release along with the budget, retains HIV/AIDS as the administration's top funding priority, but will devote new funding to reducing deaths from complications related to pregnancy or childbirth, poor nutrition and common treatable illnesses that kill millions every year, particularly women and children, according to people familiar with the new plan.
The strategy also seeks to work more closely with individual countries to help strengthen their own health-care systems, and to integrate programs that are now focused on individual diseases. The hope is to make care more efficient and easy, so that, for example, a woman doesn't have to go to one clinic for AIDS treatment, another for prenatal care, and still another for her young child's care, people familiar with the plan say.
Improving health systems has taken on new urgency in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, where thousands may have died because of a lack of adequate hospital care, and women and children are now at particular risk of disease, global health experts say.
The details of the new plan will fill in a pledge by President Barack Obama in May to request $63 billion between 2009 and 2014, including $51 billion to combat HIV/AIDS and malaria, and $12 billion for other priorities, including maternal and child health.
While the bulk of funding will go toward HIV/AIDS, AIDS advocates are concerned the administration is scaling back an aggressive initiative launched by President George W. Bush in 2003. Funding for HIV/AIDS programs is still rising, but the increase has slowed. Mr. Obama's fiscal 2010 budget requested a $165 million increase in funding for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or Pepfar, the program established by Mr. Bush. The government committed nearly $19 billion for the program between 2004 and 2008, and it had enrolled about 2.4 million people into drug therapy by the end of last year.
Advocates said they would be watching closely on Monday for details of the new plan. A broader global health strategy is "great, but not at the expense of AIDS spending," said Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance.
Administration officials declined to discuss specific funding requests before Monday's release of the proposed budget. But they stressed that HIV/AIDS remained the cornerstone of the administration's global health strategy, and said the new plan wasn't meant to trade one priority off against another. Further reducing deaths from AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis will require strengthening health systems in individual countries, they say, giving them greater capacity to fight these killer diseases.
"This isn't a trade-off; this is a holistic view of health," said a senior administration official, calling it "absolutely consistent with building and strengthening the Pepfar program."
Preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV will be an important part of the new policy's focus on maternal and child health, for example; approximately 60% of those infected with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa are women, the official noted.
Some global health experts praised the new attention the U.S. is devoting to maternal and child health. Focusing on the health needs of mothers and children will improve health systems overall, they say. "It's not something you can do on a campaign basis, like polio," said Nils Daulaire, professor of global health at the University of Washington, who was president and chief executive of the Global Health Council and a senior official in the Clinton administration. "You've got to have an operating, capable health system open 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
Among initiatives targeted for increased funding are family planning, to prevent some of the 52 million unintended pregnancies each year, and the reduction or elimination of tropical diseases such as lymphatic filariasis, a parasitic disease that affects more than 120 million people world-wide, and onchocerciasis, or river blindness.
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Tuesday, February 2, 2010
CBN, NDIC Begin ‘Target Examination’ of Banks
In a bid to verify the integrity of the data of the December 31 common year end results, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) will today begin a joint target examination of the 24 banks in the country.
The banks will, however, not be taken unawares, as they have received a letter to this effect.
The exercise, THISDAY learnt, is to enable the banking watchdog to approve the financial accounts of banks for the year ended December 31, 2009 which when published must state both the income and expenditure of the respective banks.
The exercise is expected to be completed within the next three weeks.
According to sources, officials of the banking supervision department of the CBN and NDIC had their pre-examination meetings in Lagos last Thursday with a view to working out what members of each group would be looking for when they get to their respective banks.
In banking parlance, target examination is meant for a specific purpose – the examiners are only expected to scrutinise the accounts of banks for the year ended December 31, 2009.
However, if they find anything suspicious while carrying out their duties, they may call for a special examination.
Other types are routine examination, which is conducted once a year by CBN in collaboration with the NDIC, and maiden examination which is conducted six months after a new bank has been established.
Confirming these developments, a top official of the CBN said banks need not fear as this was the standard practice.
“Everytime when the financial statements of banks are ready, we usually look into their books. We cannot afford to just seat down in Abuja and approve whatever figures they send to us.
“We have to keep checking and make banks realise that there are consequences of giving false reports,” she said.
The official noted that many of the rescued banks were making losses but declaring profits and using depositors’ funds to pay dividends.
“Because many of them are owners of the banks, if they declare losses, they won’t have money to pay their own dividends. So over the years, they’ve been paying through depositors’ funds,” she said.
As a result of the regulations requiring greater provisions for possible loan losses, following the accumulation of over N1.4 trillion toxic assets from failed loans granted to buy stocks and investments in oil and gas sectors, only seven banks made profits in their third quarter ended September 30, 2009. The remaining 17 banks declared losses, with the shareholders going home without dividends.
THISDAY had exclusively reported that both the CBN and the NDIC commenced a risk-based examination of all the banks using two banks with large cross border expansion scheme as a pilot system. Before now, supervision of banks was compliance-based.
The newspaper had also exclusively reported last Saturday that the CBN withdrew its resident examiners from banks preparatory for the risk-based supervision.
The new system is intended to be pro-active as the current compliance-based examination does not have the capacity to detect risk-based issues.
Under the risk-based supervision, the CBN can visit banks as many times as possible depending on the institutions’ risk profile.
It was originally part of the 13-point agenda of the former governor of CBN, Professor Chukwuma Soludo, but it was not implemented before he left office.
The examiners are expected to work closely with banks with a view to understanding the nature of their businesses and categorising the risks associated with it.
But the exercise, which has now been extended to other banks, created an uneasy calm in the banking industry.
Some bankers and market watchers are mixing up the issue of risk-based examination with bank audit – that requires a thorough scrutiny of banks like those of the August and October 2009 respectively – that necessitated the removal of eight managing directors and their respective executive directors and injection of about N620 billion in nine banks.
They had questioned why the apex bank ordered an examination of all the banks including the 14 it cleared on August 15 and October 2, and queried what could have changed in the financial positions of these institutions since then.
But the risk-based supervision, a CBN official had told THISDAY, was intended to spot early warning signals rather than the current “medicine after death”.
The banks will, however, not be taken unawares, as they have received a letter to this effect.
The exercise, THISDAY learnt, is to enable the banking watchdog to approve the financial accounts of banks for the year ended December 31, 2009 which when published must state both the income and expenditure of the respective banks.
The exercise is expected to be completed within the next three weeks.
According to sources, officials of the banking supervision department of the CBN and NDIC had their pre-examination meetings in Lagos last Thursday with a view to working out what members of each group would be looking for when they get to their respective banks.
In banking parlance, target examination is meant for a specific purpose – the examiners are only expected to scrutinise the accounts of banks for the year ended December 31, 2009.
However, if they find anything suspicious while carrying out their duties, they may call for a special examination.
Other types are routine examination, which is conducted once a year by CBN in collaboration with the NDIC, and maiden examination which is conducted six months after a new bank has been established.
Confirming these developments, a top official of the CBN said banks need not fear as this was the standard practice.
“Everytime when the financial statements of banks are ready, we usually look into their books. We cannot afford to just seat down in Abuja and approve whatever figures they send to us.
“We have to keep checking and make banks realise that there are consequences of giving false reports,” she said.
The official noted that many of the rescued banks were making losses but declaring profits and using depositors’ funds to pay dividends.
“Because many of them are owners of the banks, if they declare losses, they won’t have money to pay their own dividends. So over the years, they’ve been paying through depositors’ funds,” she said.
As a result of the regulations requiring greater provisions for possible loan losses, following the accumulation of over N1.4 trillion toxic assets from failed loans granted to buy stocks and investments in oil and gas sectors, only seven banks made profits in their third quarter ended September 30, 2009. The remaining 17 banks declared losses, with the shareholders going home without dividends.
THISDAY had exclusively reported that both the CBN and the NDIC commenced a risk-based examination of all the banks using two banks with large cross border expansion scheme as a pilot system. Before now, supervision of banks was compliance-based.
The newspaper had also exclusively reported last Saturday that the CBN withdrew its resident examiners from banks preparatory for the risk-based supervision.
The new system is intended to be pro-active as the current compliance-based examination does not have the capacity to detect risk-based issues.
Under the risk-based supervision, the CBN can visit banks as many times as possible depending on the institutions’ risk profile.
It was originally part of the 13-point agenda of the former governor of CBN, Professor Chukwuma Soludo, but it was not implemented before he left office.
The examiners are expected to work closely with banks with a view to understanding the nature of their businesses and categorising the risks associated with it.
But the exercise, which has now been extended to other banks, created an uneasy calm in the banking industry.
Some bankers and market watchers are mixing up the issue of risk-based examination with bank audit – that requires a thorough scrutiny of banks like those of the August and October 2009 respectively – that necessitated the removal of eight managing directors and their respective executive directors and injection of about N620 billion in nine banks.
They had questioned why the apex bank ordered an examination of all the banks including the 14 it cleared on August 15 and October 2, and queried what could have changed in the financial positions of these institutions since then.
But the risk-based supervision, a CBN official had told THISDAY, was intended to spot early warning signals rather than the current “medicine after death”.
CBN, NDIC Begin ‘Target Examination’ of Banks
In a bid to verify the integrity of the data of the December 31 common year end results, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) will today begin a joint target examination of the 24 banks in the country.
The banks will, however, not be taken unawares, as they have received a letter to this effect.
The exercise, THISDAY learnt, is to enable the banking watchdog to approve the financial accounts of banks for the year ended December 31, 2009 which when published must state both the income and expenditure of the respective banks.
The exercise is expected to be completed within the next three weeks.
According to sources, officials of the banking supervision department of the CBN and NDIC had their pre-examination meetings in Lagos last Thursday with a view to working out what members of each group would be looking for when they get to their respective banks.
In banking parlance, target examination is meant for a specific purpose – the examiners are only expected to scrutinise the accounts of banks for the year ended December 31, 2009.
However, if they find anything suspicious while carrying out their duties, they may call for a special examination.
Other types are routine examination, which is conducted once a year by CBN in collaboration with the NDIC, and maiden examination which is conducted six months after a new bank has been established.
Confirming these developments, a top official of the CBN said banks need not fear as this was the standard practice.
“Everytime when the financial statements of banks are ready, we usually look into their books. We cannot afford to just seat down in Abuja and approve whatever figures they send to us.
“We have to keep checking and make banks realise that there are consequences of giving false reports,” she said.
The official noted that many of the rescued banks were making losses but declaring profits and using depositors’ funds to pay dividends.
“Because many of them are owners of the banks, if they declare losses, they won’t have money to pay their own dividends. So over the years, they’ve been paying through depositors’ funds,” she said.
As a result of the regulations requiring greater provisions for possible loan losses, following the accumulation of over N1.4 trillion toxic assets from failed loans granted to buy stocks and investments in oil and gas sectors, only seven banks made profits in their third quarter ended September 30, 2009. The remaining 17 banks declared losses, with the shareholders going home without dividends.
THISDAY had exclusively reported that both the CBN and the NDIC commenced a risk-based examination of all the banks using two banks with large cross border expansion scheme as a pilot system. Before now, supervision of banks was compliance-based.
The newspaper had also exclusively reported last Saturday that the CBN withdrew its resident examiners from banks preparatory for the risk-based supervision.
The new system is intended to be pro-active as the current compliance-based examination does not have the capacity to detect risk-based issues.
Under the risk-based supervision, the CBN can visit banks as many times as possible depending on the institutions’ risk profile.
It was originally part of the 13-point agenda of the former governor of CBN, Professor Chukwuma Soludo, but it was not implemented before he left office.
The examiners are expected to work closely with banks with a view to understanding the nature of their businesses and categorising the risks associated with it.
But the exercise, which has now been extended to other banks, created an uneasy calm in the banking industry.
Some bankers and market watchers are mixing up the issue of risk-based examination with bank audit – that requires a thorough scrutiny of banks like those of the August and October 2009 respectively – that necessitated the removal of eight managing directors and their respective executive directors and injection of about N620 billion in nine banks.
They had questioned why the apex bank ordered an examination of all the banks including the 14 it cleared on August 15 and October 2, and queried what could have changed in the financial positions of these institutions since then.
But the risk-based supervision, a CBN official had told THISDAY, was intended to spot early warning signals rather than the current “medicine after death”.
The banks will, however, not be taken unawares, as they have received a letter to this effect.
The exercise, THISDAY learnt, is to enable the banking watchdog to approve the financial accounts of banks for the year ended December 31, 2009 which when published must state both the income and expenditure of the respective banks.
The exercise is expected to be completed within the next three weeks.
According to sources, officials of the banking supervision department of the CBN and NDIC had their pre-examination meetings in Lagos last Thursday with a view to working out what members of each group would be looking for when they get to their respective banks.
In banking parlance, target examination is meant for a specific purpose – the examiners are only expected to scrutinise the accounts of banks for the year ended December 31, 2009.
However, if they find anything suspicious while carrying out their duties, they may call for a special examination.
Other types are routine examination, which is conducted once a year by CBN in collaboration with the NDIC, and maiden examination which is conducted six months after a new bank has been established.
Confirming these developments, a top official of the CBN said banks need not fear as this was the standard practice.
“Everytime when the financial statements of banks are ready, we usually look into their books. We cannot afford to just seat down in Abuja and approve whatever figures they send to us.
“We have to keep checking and make banks realise that there are consequences of giving false reports,” she said.
The official noted that many of the rescued banks were making losses but declaring profits and using depositors’ funds to pay dividends.
“Because many of them are owners of the banks, if they declare losses, they won’t have money to pay their own dividends. So over the years, they’ve been paying through depositors’ funds,” she said.
As a result of the regulations requiring greater provisions for possible loan losses, following the accumulation of over N1.4 trillion toxic assets from failed loans granted to buy stocks and investments in oil and gas sectors, only seven banks made profits in their third quarter ended September 30, 2009. The remaining 17 banks declared losses, with the shareholders going home without dividends.
THISDAY had exclusively reported that both the CBN and the NDIC commenced a risk-based examination of all the banks using two banks with large cross border expansion scheme as a pilot system. Before now, supervision of banks was compliance-based.
The newspaper had also exclusively reported last Saturday that the CBN withdrew its resident examiners from banks preparatory for the risk-based supervision.
The new system is intended to be pro-active as the current compliance-based examination does not have the capacity to detect risk-based issues.
Under the risk-based supervision, the CBN can visit banks as many times as possible depending on the institutions’ risk profile.
It was originally part of the 13-point agenda of the former governor of CBN, Professor Chukwuma Soludo, but it was not implemented before he left office.
The examiners are expected to work closely with banks with a view to understanding the nature of their businesses and categorising the risks associated with it.
But the exercise, which has now been extended to other banks, created an uneasy calm in the banking industry.
Some bankers and market watchers are mixing up the issue of risk-based examination with bank audit – that requires a thorough scrutiny of banks like those of the August and October 2009 respectively – that necessitated the removal of eight managing directors and their respective executive directors and injection of about N620 billion in nine banks.
They had questioned why the apex bank ordered an examination of all the banks including the 14 it cleared on August 15 and October 2, and queried what could have changed in the financial positions of these institutions since then.
But the risk-based supervision, a CBN official had told THISDAY, was intended to spot early warning signals rather than the current “medicine after death”.
Vandals Disrupt Shell Pipeline in Nigeria
LAGOS, Nigeria—The breach in an oil pipeline operated by Royal Dutch Shell PLC Saturday was caused by vandals attempting to steal oil and wasn't a militant attack, a security official close to the situation said Monday.
The breach, which resulted in the shutdown of three flow stations that lead to the Forcados export terminal, was caused by "vandalism and not an explosive attack," the official told Dow Jones Newswires.
Shell said Sunday that sabotage on a pipeline had shut down three flow stations after "a leak was observed [Saturday] on the Trans Ramos Pipeline." It was unclear how much production was affected.
The main militant group in the Niger Delta Saturday called off a five-month cease-fire, pledging an "all-out onslaught against [oil companies'] installations and personnel," but according to the security official it appears the pipeline breach wasn't caused by militants. Nigerian military officials in the Niger Delta weren't immediately available for comment.
By WILL CONNORS
The breach, which resulted in the shutdown of three flow stations that lead to the Forcados export terminal, was caused by "vandalism and not an explosive attack," the official told Dow Jones Newswires.
Shell said Sunday that sabotage on a pipeline had shut down three flow stations after "a leak was observed [Saturday] on the Trans Ramos Pipeline." It was unclear how much production was affected.
The main militant group in the Niger Delta Saturday called off a five-month cease-fire, pledging an "all-out onslaught against [oil companies'] installations and personnel," but according to the security official it appears the pipeline breach wasn't caused by militants. Nigerian military officials in the Niger Delta weren't immediately available for comment.
By WILL CONNORS
Monday, February 1, 2010
PRIORITY
WHAT UNDERSTANDING ABOUT PRIORITY AND ITS IMPLICATION
For more information contact
Minister: Obakemi Moses Oladapo
08035035079
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