Stakeholders across Nigeria’s health sector have called for a shift from multiple small-scale pilot programmes to scalable, data-driven solutions capable of strengthening the country’s fragmented healthcare system.
The call was made at an engagement meeting tagged “From Pilot to Scale: Shaping the Future of Health Innovation” held in Abuja on Wednesday.
The stakeholders stressed the need for nationwide solutions built on a single source of data and supported by real-time decision-making to improve efficiency and health outcomes.
Speaking with journalists, Dr Jerome Mafeni, Technical Adviser, Network for Health Equity and Development (NHED), said the meeting was convened to address recurring challenges in the health sector, especially projects that show promise but never progress beyond the pilot stage.
According to him, significant resources are often invested in health and digital innovation pilots that deliver results but fail to secure funding for implementation at national, regional or global scale.
“This is essentially a coming together of key stakeholders across the entire health system value chain to examine how we can move away from investing in multiple small pilot programmes that never get funded for large-scale implementation,” he said.
Mafeni noted that Nigeria’s health system remained highly fragmented, with weak data management practices and poor health indicators.
He said the system still relied heavily on manual, paper-based data collection processes, resulting in delays before information was digitised, validated and approved for use.
“By the time data is validated and officially signed off, three months may have passed and the information is already obsolete,” he said.
To address the challenge, Mafeni said experiences from programme implementation had shown that large-scale systems could be deployed from the outset and improved progressively over time.
He explained that the approach centred on creating a “single source of truth” where governments, donors, development partners and implementing agencies worked from the same dataset.
“It is very possible for us to change the way we work and have a single source of truth that everyone aligns with, whether at state, national or partner level,” he said.
According to him, the objective goes beyond data harmonisation to changing how institutions use information for decision-making.
He said the proposed system would ensure that data used for decision-making was no more than one week old, while frontline workers would be able to access and update information in real time.
Mafeni added that artificial intelligence could analyse incoming data instantly, identify challenges and generate insights without the need for lengthy manual calculations.
“Basically, it is supposed to make life easier for everybody in the value chain,” he said.
He added that participants agreed that improving efficiency, effectiveness and policymakers’ understanding of resource utilisation was critical to improving health service delivery.
Also speaking, Mr Chibueze Adirieje of the Institute of Human Virology Nigeria (IHVN) underscored the importance of harmonised health information systems for effective planning and improved health outcomes.
“We need information to plan, and that information is data.
“In the healthcare space, we have always tried to gather accurate data, but one of our major challenges has been how to use it effectively.
“What this initiative has done since 2024 is provide a single platform where data is aggregated, monitored and analysed through an AI-enabled system,” he said.
According to Adirieje, the system focuses not only on cleaning data but also on ensuring its accuracy and usefulness for decision-making.
He said Nigeria must embrace innovation in health system planning to improve outcomes and address longstanding inefficiencies.
Mr Paul Bhuhi, Managing Director of Vantage Health Technologies, South Africa, said the proliferation of pilot projects across Africa had yielded limited results in spite of substantial investments.
According to him, only a small proportion of pilot projects achieve sustainable scale, highlighting the need for a different approach.
“So the problem we are trying to solve is that there are many pilots across Africa and Nigeria, but very few succeed.
“Why not start with the end in mind and create solutions designed for national scale and wider impact from the outset?” he said.