Nigeria’s digital health sector has become one of the most exciting corners of the country’s tech story. Ironically, most Nigerians still can’t tell you which hospital to trust in an emergency.
Over $271 million has flowed into more than 120 health-tech startups in recent years, with more ventures launched in the five years since COVID than in the previous fifteen combined. Investors are excited. Founders are shipping apps. Yet healthcare still looks much as it did a decade ago: long queues, uncertainty about which facility can actually help, and bills that fall largely on the
patient. Out-of-pocket spending still accounts for roughly 72 percent of healthcare costs.
That gap between capital raised and outcomes felt is worth sitting with. The problem was never a shortage of ideas. As PSHAN Director Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede put it recently, “ideas create possibilities, but systems create results.” We have apps that can book appointments, triage symptoms and deliver medication. What we lack is the infrastructure that lets them talk to each
other and trust each other’s data. When someone collapses in traffic in Lagos, there is usually no shared medical record, no reliable way to identify an appropriate nearby facility, and no digital thread connecting the ambulance, hospital and pharmacy. That is not a technology gap. It is a plumbing gap.
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To its credit, the Federal Government has noticed. In June, President Tinubu approved the National Health Technology and Data Analytics Office, appointing Obi Adigwe as its pioneer coordinator under Health Minister Muhammad Ali Pate. The new office is meant to anchor the Nigeria Digital Health Initiative, including an interoperable services network, a Health Claims Exchange and a Health Information Exchange. Scaling this is expected to cost roughly ₦500 billion over five years, bringing systems such as DHIS2, SORMAS and NHIA’s claims platforms into a more connected national data space.
That is the right diagnosis. Whether it is the right cure depends on what the new office is actually allowed to do. Nigeria already has NITDA setting IT standards, the NDPC regulating sensitive data, NHIA and NPHCDA running their own systems, and the Ministry of Health coordinating health information. Layering a new office over all of that solves nothing if it arrives with its own
staff, budget, and reporting line and simply becomes one more actor at the table. It only earns its ₦500 billion if it has the authority to make the others build to the same standard, the same way a building code matters more than another contractor.
None of this means the private sector should wait for government to finish laying pipe. The more interesting experiments in Nigerian health-tech treat coordination itself as the product. The Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria, for instance, recently convened banks, telecom foundations, and philanthropic partners around Vivo Health, a platform built around a shared identifier that lets a patient’s medical profile follow them across facilities. Its real value is the proof that competitors can be talked into sharing rails instead of each building a walled garden. That is exactly the muscle a national interoperability standard will need.
Nigeria still has no dedicated law governing telemedicine or health-data interoperability. A National e-Health Bill passed second reading in the Senate this July and now sits with the Health Committee. Until it passes, the new federal office and private platforms are operating against guidelines never designed for AI symptom checkers or cross-institutional data exchange.
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If the ₦500 billion is going to buy fewer preventable deaths rather than another org chart, three things need to happen. First, the e-Health Bill should give the new office real enforcement teeth over NITDA, NDPC, NHIA, and NPHCDA, not just a convening role. Second, investors and development partners should judge health-tech platforms by the systems they can exchange data with, not just their user numbers, A triage app that cannot refer a patient into a functioning record is a nicer waiting room, not a cure. Third, the conversation must move beyond Lagos and Abuja pilots to the electricity and connectivity needed to make these systems work in Kano, Enugu, or rural Bayelsa.
Nigeria did not get here by lacking ambition, in government or outside it. What decides whether this new push pays off for patients, rather than producing one more well-funded office, is whether it builds the plumbing to match the fixtures.
Muyiwa Olowoporoku is the Head, Membership and Partnerships at the Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria (PSHAN)
