What the next WHO director-general must learn from Nigeria’s health reforms, By Chinedu Moghalu
Nigeria's recent health reforms are producing numbers that are hard to ignore. By August, the National Health Insurance Authority had reported that 80,000 women received emergency maternal care. A month later, insurance enrolment had surpassed 23 million. These are not small figures, and they point to something shifting in how the country manages public health at scale.
The lesson Chinedu Moghalu draws from this progress is less about the numbers themselves and more about the method behind them. The approach is straightforward: track how funds are allocated, follow those allocations through to actual service delivery, then check whether the people who need those services can realistically afford to access them. It is a chain of accountability that keeps the money connected to the human outcome.
As the World Health Organization prepares to name its next director-general by October 2026, Moghalu argues this model deserves serious attention at the global level. The question he leaves open is whether international health leadership is ready to adopt that kind of ground-level discipline.
Originally published by Premium Times.