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Background: Absenteeism is widespread in Nigerian health facilities and is a major barrier to achievement of effective Universal Health Coverage. We have examined the role of internal (by managerial staff within facilities) and external (by managers at a higher level) supervision arrangements on health worker absenteeism. Specifically, we sought to determine whether these forms of supervision have any role to play in reducing health worker absenteeism in health facilities in Enugu State Nigeria.Methods: We conducted interviews with 412 health workers in urban and rural areas of Enugu State, in South-Eastern Nigeria. We used binary logistic regression to estimate the role of different types of supervision on health worker absenteeism in selected health facilities in Enugu State.Results: Internal supervision arrangements significantly reduce health worker absenteeism (odds ratio = 0.516, p = 0.03). In contrast, existing external supervision arrangements were associated with a small but significant increase in absenteeism (OR = 1.02, 0.043). Those reporting a better financial situation were more likely to report being absent (OR = 1.36, p < 0.01) but there was no association with age and marital status of respondents. Our findings also pointed to the potential for alternative forms of supervision, provided in a supportive rather than punitive way, for example by community groups monitoring the activities of health workers but trying to understand what support these workers may need, within or beyond the work environment.Conclusion: The existing system of external supervision of absenteeism in health facilities in Nigeria is not working but alternatives that take a more holistic approach to the lived experiences of health workers might offer an alternative.

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between economic growth and unemployment in Nigeria under the Okun’s Law framework. The Auto Regressive Distributed Lag model approach, the ARDL Bounds Test and Cointegration Test were employed in this paper. Economic Growth was also regressed on unemployment, log of industrial output, log of net foreign assets, log of foreign direct investment and population growth so as to know the impact of these variables on output. The research findings indicated that high the Okun’s specification does not hold in the Nigeria, the impact of economic growth on unemployment is negative and insignificant. We did however find that there is a positive impact of unemployment on economic growth, meaning that the phenomena of jobless growth may be in play in the economy. The Johansen Co-integration test failed to establish evidence of long run relationship between GDP, industrial output, unemployment, foreign direct investment net foreign assets and population growth. The ECM could not be employed because the variables were integrated of different orders. It was however found there exist a significant positive relationship between the aforementioned variables and GDP except for population growth. The government should consider the Industrial Sector as a priority sector in a bid for better economic growth and development. Population control measures should also be put in play to ensure that the population does not exceed the economic carrying capacity. The government should also play an important role in abating unemployment in the economy using direct and indirect schemes and strategies.

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Over the years, researchers have found conflicting results regarding the relationship between public education expenditure and economic growth in Nigeria and there seem to be no clear distinction regarding which of capital and recurrent components contributes more to the growth of a nation's economy. Hence, this work empirically investigated the impact of capital and recurrent public education expenditure on economic growth in Nigeria so as to ascertain which component contributes more to economic growth. The study applied ordinary least squares technique on time series data for the period, 1981-2016 and found that capital component of the total education expenditure had stronger impact (17%) on the nation'ʹs economy (GDP) than its recurrent counterpart (13%). The Granger Causality test showed that while capital education expenditure granger causes economic growth in Nigeria, recurrent education expenditure does not. This work therefore recommends that Nigerian government should step up her yearly budgetary allocation to education from the current single digit averaging about 7% of the total budget to double digits so as to boost the growth of her economy and that such allocation should pay more attention to the capital component as it promotes growth more than its recurrent counterpart.