Nigeria’s Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Professor Muhammad Ali Pate has announced remarkable gains in the country’s health sector in 2025.
Prof. Pate made the announcement on the opening day of the 2025 Joint Annual Review (JAR) Conference, held at Transcorp Hilton in Abuja on Wednesday 12th November, 2025.
According to him, the Compact which was signed in 2023 in the presence of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has positioned Nigeria to further drive our progress towards universal health coverage.
Announcing some significant progress made in the year under review, the Minister said 84% of our key performance indicators under the Presidential Bond commitments have been achieved as of Q3 2025.
“That is 37 out of 41. And 35 states out of 36, including FCT, have now conducted their state joint annual reviews and state performance dialogues with active citizen participation in sector decision-making at all levels.
“All the 36 states and FCT have their annual operational plans that are fully aligned with the health sector strategic blueprint and the priorities indicated therein.
“72% of states have established functional non-communicable disease coordination mechanisms to deal with hypertension, diabetes, and other non-communicable diseases”.
Prof. Pate said these results show that the Compact commitments were not just words on paper, “they have been translated into tangible actions at federal and state levels.
According to him, Nigeria is steadily shifting from a fragmented, donor-led programming to more coordinated, more coherent, nationally-owned systems driven by the need to achieve results.
On service coverage, across the reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health and primary health care indicators, the Minister said the data have shown consistent progress and expansion of service utilisation in 2025.
“There are so many of those across 2025, and according to the quality-adjusted DHIS-2 data, the percentage of deliveries attended by skilled birth attendants is now more than 90%. Given where we were, I think that’s a remarkable improvement.
“And routine HMIS data indicate that the 4th internal care coverage was 39% in 2023, while the correspondence survey was 52%. For 2024 and 2025, the coverage levels exceed 50% in both years. So, we have seen a bump in terms of women attending and in terms of cleaning.
“New family planning acceptance has increased steadily every quarter, with an overall 10% increase from Q1 2025 to Q3 2025.
The Minister said the progress is a promising trend for crushing maternal mortality, emphasizing that half of women of reproductive health age were using modern contraception which is very good because it meets the augmented needs of our women, respecting their rights, respect the tradition, the culture, and the values, and the rights of each family to decide what is good for itself.
Continuing, Prof. Pate said, “Our routine data has shown modest improvements in vaccination coverage for specific antigens, hitting the target for measles and others
“The primary healthcare utilisation in BHCPF facilities grew from 10 million visits in Q1 2024 to 37 million visits in Q1 2025 and to 45 million visits in Q2 2025, showing renewed public confidence in accessing primary health services. This is remarkable”.
He said the work that is being done in the health sector by the President Tinubu-led administration is beginning to show results by people showing up for services.
The health minister added that in terms of maternal outcomes, maternal deaths have declined by 17 percent and newborn deaths by 12 percent across the 172 local government areas that we targeted.
“Because maternal death is not distributed equally across all local governments, using good data, we identified those and we focused on those local governments and we’re already beginning to see a 17 percent reduction in maternal deaths and 12 percent reduction in newborn deaths”.
“It’s good validation that we’re making good progress. 52 percent of those 172 local governments have now at least two level two primary health care facilities and 435 facilities have been revitalised in those 172 local government areas.
“More than 15,000 community health workers have been recruited across priority states and we’ve retrained almost 70,000 frontline health workers, as we had promised on our path to 120,000 by 2027.
“The skilled birth attendance coverage has increased by 33 percent and for the pre-local governments, 4,000 free caesarean sections have been conducted in the NHIA facilities.
He recalled that last year the government announced plans to cover emergency obstetric services including caesarean section, which is the barrier to many women accessing the critical services to save their lives.
“So that is beginning to show promise. In a systematic way, I think we’re making progress. There’s so many more data points, but I will leave it to the technical discussions,” he emphasized.
Prof. Pate noted that this year’s gains built on the baseline that was set last year and serves as a crucial accountability tool that allows us to track this progress, identify the gaps, and chart a unified course towards better health outcomes for every Nigerian.
The Minister said the theme, “All Hands. One Mission.” emphasises our unity of purpose across the board.
He added that our mission is to bring in Nigeria’s health sector with higher capacity, both our collective aspiration and our shared responsibility.
The conference was attended by Wale Edun, Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy and Sen. Abubakar Atiku Bagudu, Minister of budget and National Planning.
Highpoint was the signing of the Compact addendum.