The Director-General of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), Dr Kelechi Ohiri, says Nigeria must develop health innovations and policies that address its unique challenges and priorities to achieve sustainable improvements in healthcare delivery.
Ohiri spoke at the Future of Health Conference, organised by Nigeria Health Watch in Abuja on Thursday. The conference’s theme was “From Innovation to Impact: The Future of Health Is Now”.
He said Nigeria needed to take ownership of its health system by designing solutions based on local evidence, strengthening domestic research and building an innovation ecosystem capable of delivering measurable outcomes.
“Every country needs to make its own decision based on the evidence it has, and it needs to tailor its solution to the context in which that country exists,” he said.
Ohiri said innovation should extend beyond gadgets and technology to include healthcare financing, service delivery, governance and the capacity of frontline health workers.
“It is imperative that we must innovate,” he said, adding that Nigeria needed to move beyond incremental changes and test and scale new approaches to longstanding health challenges.
He said the country faced the combined burden of infectious and non-communicable diseases, high mortality rates and constraints in healthcare financing. These challenges required solutions suited to Nigeria’s complex health needs.
According to him, innovation should be assessed by its ability to improve health outcomes and protect people from financial hardship, rather than by the volume of discussions or pilot projects.
“Whether we are successful or not, it’s not going to be measured by a lot of talk. It will be measured by whether a woman suffering from an obstetric-like condition has her health restored without going into health poverty,” he said.
Ohiri cited the NHIA’s intervention to finance emergency obstetric care as an example of adapting healthcare financing to patients’ needs.
He said about 90,000 women had benefited from the intervention in the previous 18 months. He described the programme as a response to delays and financial barriers that could prevent women experiencing childbirth complications from receiving timely care.
He also said about 70,000 people had been integrated into health insurance through initiatives involving states, including efforts to improve access to care for people living with HIV and tuberculosis.
Ohiri said Nigeria needed to strengthen local research and establish clear pathways for assessing health technologies to determine which innovations could deliver the greatest benefits to Nigerians.
He said the NHIA had inaugurated a research platform in partnership with Nigeria Health Policy to support Nigerian researchers in developing evidence and solutions tailored to local health challenges.
“We need a health system that is for us. One that is responsive to our needs,” he said.
Earlier, Vivianne Ihekweazu, managing director of Nigeria Health Watch, said the conference was designed to shift attention from discussing future innovations to examining existing solutions to health challenges and how they could be scaled.
She said the theme reflected the need to ensure innovations translated into practical improvements for people who needed healthcare immediately.
“A pregnant woman is not going to wait for some innovation in two years’ time to say, ‘Ah, now she’s getting better.’ She needs that innovation right now,” Ihekweazu said.
She said previous editions of the conference had examined issues including private-sector participation in healthcare and the migration of health workers, while the 2026 edition focused on innovations, their impact and the conditions required to scale them.
Ihekweazu said the conference would showcase approaches spanning maternal health, family planning, digital health, agriculture and climate-resilient healthcare facilities.
She added that the platform offered stakeholders an opportunity to examine the policy environment, funding and implementation challenges that could determine whether promising solutions reached the people who needed them.
The conference brought together health-sector stakeholders to examine how innovations, partnerships, research and sustainable financing could improve healthcare delivery in Nigeria.
The programme featured presentations on practical innovations, discussions on scaling effective solutions and a signature conversation on strengthening Nigeria’s and West Africa’s leadership in vaccine-trial science.
