The Power of Health Production in Nigeria

Daftar Isi

A New Approach to Health: Beyond Treatment

When Nigeria's Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Professor Muhammad Ali Pate, talks about "producing health," he is not just using a catchy phrase. He is highlighting a significant policy shift in the country's approach to healthcare. Modern healthcare systems have made incredible strides in treating illness, with the ability to stabilize trauma, control outbreaks, and manage complex conditions. Specialized professionals can perform life-saving surgeries, vaccines can prevent deadly epidemics, and emergency units can keep critically ill patients alive long enough for recovery. However, the challenges facing the healthcare sector today are increasingly linked to chronic conditions that arise from daily living, often long before a patient even reaches a clinic.

Hospitals were designed to diagnose and intervene when something goes wrong. They rely on specialized professionals, regulated financing, and advanced medical technology. While this model is effective for treating disease, it has limited power over the behaviors and exposures that lead to illness in the first place. Medication can control hypertension, but it cannot ensure healthier dietary choices over a lifetime. A cardiac procedure can restore blood flow, but it does not undo years of inactivity that led to the condition. Once discharged, patients return to the same environments and habits that contributed to their illness.

This reality underscores the importance of "producing health" as a concept. It reflects a recognition that expanding facilities, training personnel, and strengthening financing alone are not sufficient to reduce the rising burden of preventable illness. Chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, certain cancers, and neurodegenerative disorders are not reversed by medical care. Instead, treatment helps manage their consequences rather than eliminate their root causes. These illnesses develop over time, fueled by diets dominated by processed foods, industries that profit from harmful consumption, unmanaged stress, and unhealthy habits.

Within the Nigeria Health Sector Renewal Investment Initiative (NHSRII), producing health is one of three key aspirations alongside saving lives and reducing physical and financial pain. These efforts are already yielding measurable results. Skilled birth attendance is now above 90% nationally, with a 33% increase in priority local government areas, showing how frontline capacity and financial protection can improve maternal survival outcomes. Primary health care utilization has grown from about 10 million to 45 million visits between early 2024 and the second quarter of 2025, indicating more Nigerians are receiving care early, rather than waiting for catastrophic illnesses. In 172 targeted local government areas, maternal deaths have fallen by 17%, and newborn deaths by 12%, supported by the revitalization of over 435 primary health care facilities and the recruitment of around 15,000 community health workers.

Financial protection has also improved. Health insurance coverage has expanded to approximately 12% in two years, and roughly 4,000 free caesarean sections have been delivered through the National Health Insurance Authority. These are women who would otherwise have faced catastrophic costs, possibly delaying treatment or turning to unsafe alternatives. These gains show that health systems reduce suffering when they are accessible, affordable, and staffed by capable workers. They demonstrate that investment, accountability, and delivery are beginning to save lives and protect households financially.

Yet, these improvements also highlight why treatment alone is not enough. A reform agenda focused solely on building more hospitals or delivering more procedures will always fall short without addressing the products and commercial practices that fuel chronic disease. The same system that is saving lives must also reduce exposure to harm. This explains the growing push for stronger regulation of alcohol, tobacco, and sweetened beverages. Reducing their aggressive marketing and widespread availability is not moral policing—it is an economic and health imperative, as these products drive preventable illness, raise household spending on care, and increase the burden on the very system taxpayers are investing in to save lives.

Even the strongest health system can only treat disease; it cannot live well for its citizens. It can provide access and accountability, yet it cannot exercise, eat well, or manage stress on behalf of the population. It cannot reduce daily salt and sugar intake in homes, replace physical inactivity with movement, or remove the emotional strain that triggers unhealthy coping behaviors. These actions remain the most powerful determinants of long-term health.

Producing health involves more than just medical treatment. It includes health education that influences behavior, policies that shape consumer choices, communities designed to support physical activity, and regulation that discourages harmful products. It requires primary healthcare that guides individuals before they fall ill, rather than only managing conditions after they appear. It also calls for inter-sectoral collaboration, because the drivers of chronic disease lie as much in agriculture, trade, urban planning, and education as in hospitals. Food systems determine what people can afford to eat. Transport determines whether cities encourage walking or force sedentary living. Advertising shapes what children grow up consuming. Schools and workplaces influence daily routines more than outpatient clinics ever will.

Health is not produced by hospitals. It is produced by environments and behaviors shaped long before sickness has a name. Treatment remains essential, but prevention is what makes treatment sustainable. A health system earns its greatest value when fewer people arrive at its doors in need of rescue. Building hospitals is essential, but building conditions that keep people healthy is transformative. Producing health is not an alternative to treatment. It is what makes treatment sustainable. If Nigeria succeeds in this shift, the measure of progress will not only be in the number of lives saved in emergencies, but in the number of citizens who never reach that point at all.