NHIF hosts stakeholders to collaborate on funding startups to provide quality infrastructures
By Omolola Dede Adeyanju
The Nigerian healthcare Investment Forum has hosted a wide range of stakeholders in the health sector to create a synergy for financing startups and reforming Nigerians’ health towards easy accessibility of healthcare facilities for the people.
According to the Founder, HCA Consult and Convener, Nigeria Healthcare Investment Forum, Dr Habeeb Moshood, at the second Nigeria Healthcare Investment Forum on Wednesday, the forum was organised in order to address the funding gap in the healthcare industry which has affected healthcare infrastructures, human resources even to the point of delivering good health care services.
He explained further that: “We want to breach this gap by connecting business leaders in the health sector with financial institutions, banks and major capitalists, bringing them together in order to evaluate the different opportunities we have in the healthcare sector.
“In the healthcare industry we have funding challenges, human resources challenges and consumer behavior which is the healthcare seeking behavior of the populace in this part of the world as major challenges. A lot of work is being done to address these challenges; both short-term and long-term measures are being taken to bring a reform in the sector.
“We have been creating productive synergy and engaging with other sectors; transportation, finance, environmental protection sector and every sector as they are intertwined, we have both intra and inter sectoral collaborations,” he said.
Meanwhile, the head of Memberships and Partnerships at the Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria (PSHAN), Ota Akhigbe explaining PSHAN’s involvement in the forum said, “Being a health sector player, PSHAN is about bringing fundings from the private sector to help the government in its healthcare goals, so in that space, we interact with a lot of stakeholders, HCA being one of them around the ecosystem. Therefore, anything around healthcare and the value chain, even as regards financing, is of importance to us.”
To Mrs Akhigbe, the most interesting part of the agenda was the panel session where the Founder of the program presented a lot of innovations, what HCA and others are doing to breach that gap or good health care, building companies that will make healthcare more accessible to people, and adding funding to that is only going to add to the good narrative of improving healthcare for Nigeria which is something we are very interested in.
However, the Country Director, Healthillion Nigeria, Durojaiye Ajibola expressed the essence of a one-stop shop for everything health as Healthillion, linking people who need healthcare services to hospitals as soon as possible and making healthcare attention easily accessible.
He examined brain-drain and remuneration as reasons why Nigerian specialists in the healthcare sector opt out of the country, elucidating that Nigerian specialists feel underpaid unlike their counterparts all around the world.
