07/05/2025
Nigeria making progress in healthcare delivery — Health Minister
7th May 2025
The Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Prof Muhammad Pate, on Tuesday, said Nigeria is making notable progress in expanding access to quality healthcare services, particularly at the Primary Health Care level.
Speaking at the Sector-Wide Approach State Strategic Engagement with stakeholders from the North Central and South Western states in Abuja, Prof Pate highlighted that ongoing health sector reforms have led to approximately 80 million annual visits to PHC centres nationwide.
Pate commended state-level efforts, noting that despite existing challenges, several states have made significant progress in areas like skilled birth attendance, antenatal care, and performance data reporting.
He said, “In some areas, the performance is marginal, but we’re also learning from each other. Overall, we’re seeing improvement in how states are reporting data about their performance. Just to put it in context, every quarter, about 20 million contacts are made with Nigerians through the primary health care system that has now been revamped.
“That means about 80 million contacts. It doesn’t mean 80 million people, but it means at least 80 million contacts per year, which means that the primary health care system, imperfect as it may be, is beginning to pick up because of the reforms that this government started under the leadership of the president and with the support of all the states, the local government, civil society, and development partners, as well as Nigerians, because it is all of us, including community leaders, traditional leaders, that have to demand for the care.
“This is an exercise to assess our performance by ourselves, leading up to the joint annual review that we will do later this year, and we’re very pleased with the support that we’re seeing from all the states that are actively engaged in this effort, which is part of really the transformation that we are undertaking together with everyone.”
The Minister noted that even though it would take some time to position the country’s health sector, the current administration has in the last two years, undertaken deliberate investments which was matched by many of the states.
“With the direction that we have in the Federal Government and the States keying in, we are already beginning to see early signs that things are slowly improving, but they have to be sustained and we are committed to making sure that Nigerians get the benefit of these improvements that we are making in the system,” he added.
The National Coordinator, Sector-Wide Coordination Office, Dr. Muntaqa Umar Sadiq said the performance dialogue by states was focused on examining the core sets of indicators and allowing states to reflect on their performance and identify areas of improvement and collective action
“We do this every quarter and focus on our important priorities, everything from skilled birth attendants, routine immunization, all the important interventions required to crash maternal neonatal and under five mortality.
“This gives us a basis for performance management with states so that we’re focusing on the important notes, identifying the problems, and removing those issues to achieve our collective goals,” he stated.
He mentioned that the different problems in each of the six geopolitical zones have been identified and their efforts supported to improve their ability to save the lives of women and children.
“For the first time, we’ve not only had dialogues looking at the same sets of indicators with every state, but we’ve had a joint annual review and we’re building on that to have these performance dialogues that feed into their annual operating plans so that in the sector wide, when we say one plan, one budget, one report and one conversation, it speaks to an aggregation of every single state’s plans. And that’s why we’re quite excited.
“So states have now identified their issues, the bottlenecks stopping them from moving the needle. Some of the colours of the scorecards that you see were red. So we’ve discussed why, what are the pragmatic factors that will get them from red to green, and as a ministry; we are supporting states in debottlenecking those issues and improving their performance.
“Going forward, we hope that this will translate into improvement in population health outcomes where facilities are more functional,” he highlighted.
