The Federal Government has secured a $65 million commitment from seven private sector organisations to strengthen the delivery of the Maternal Mortality Reduction Innovation Initiative (MAMII), as part of efforts to reduce maternal deaths and ensure safer childbirth across Nigeria.
The Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Prof. Muhammad Ali Pate, announced the commitment at the 2026 Joint Annual Review (JAR), where the government also launched new policy and implementation frameworks to improve emergency obstetric care, family planning, and the quality of maternal health services.
The seven organisations involved in the Private Sector Compact are Bayer, UNICEF, Roche, Ferring, Nestlé, DSM-Firmenich and DP World.
Pate described the commitment as a major boost to the government’s drive to reduce maternal mortality, saying the initiative aligned with President Bola Tinubu’s mandate to ensure that no woman dies while giving birth.
He said the $65 million commitment was particularly significant given the prevailing economic challenges, adding that the government appreciated the partners for joining the national effort to improve maternal health outcomes.
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“We are really glad to have you join this movement to continue crushing maternal deaths. This is a mandate the president wants us to work on: to reduce maternal mortality and ensure that no woman dies while giving birth,” the minister said.
Beyond the financial commitment, the government launched the National Training and Implementation Framework for Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care, the Obstetric Fistula Framework, a section of the National Women’s Health Policy, postpartum family planning and self-care guidance, as well as guidelines on permanent family planning methods and task-sharing.
Pate explained that mobilising private sector resources and introducing innovations would not be sufficient without adequately trained health workers and effective regulatory frameworks to ensure quality service delivery.
He said the complementary tools would strengthen the capacity of healthcare workers to provide appropriate interventions and improve access to quality maternal health services.
“Private sector resources, innovation and new tools are important, but they have to be matched with capabilities at the point of service. The workers have to be trained, guided and regulated so that the tools and the people will deliver quality services to our women and save lives,” he said.
Earlier, the Minister of State for Health, Dr Iziaq Adekunle Salako, called for stronger accountability in Nigeria’s health data management, warning that inconsistent and outdated statistics could undermine evidence-based policymaking and assessments of government interventions.
Speaking at the opening of the 2026 JAR Scientific Conference, Salako said the country must address discrepancies in health indicators by reconciling data from surveys and routine administrative records.
He identified maternal mortality as a major example of the problem, noting that the maternal mortality ratio of 512 deaths per 100,000 live births, which is frequently presented as a current figure, was actually the 2018 baseline.
Salako said the continued use of outdated statistics could distort assessments of progress and make it difficult to determine the actual impact of interventions.
He also cited discrepancies in skilled birth attendance, which stood at about 86 per cent in facility reports but 50 per cent in the Mini Demographic and Health Survey.
Similarly, antenatal care coverage was reported at 58.5 per cent in survey data but below 30 per cent in some administrative records, while health insurance coverage ranged between 9.5 and 13 per cent, depending on the population base and measurement method.
According to him, the differences underscore the need for validation studies to reconcile routine and survey data, facility censuses to establish the number of functional health facilities and evaluations to determine which interventions deliver the greatest impact.
He urged researchers and policymakers to scrutinise existing programmes, identify implementation gaps and develop costed, time-bound plans to improve performance.
“No programme should be exempted, and none should be condemned without a hearing. Let us match research design to claims, separate description from impact and association from cause,” he said.
Salako disclosed that the scientific conference received 242 abstracts from across the country, out of which 59 were selected following peer review, comprising 24 oral and 35 poster presentations.
He urged participants to ensure that research findings translated into practical policy decisions, with clearly identified responsibilities and timelines for implementation.
Also speaking, the Lead of the SWAp Coordination Office, Dr Dayo Adeyanju, said MAMII was designed to address critical gaps across the maternal healthcare delivery chain, including supply chains, quality of services, skilled health personnel, emergency obstetric care and transportation.
He explained that the Private Sector Compact was established to mobilise private sector expertise, resources and technical capabilities to complement government efforts in addressing those challenges.
Adeyanju said the process leading to the compact involved about 30 meetings of a technical working group comprising government representatives, the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum, among other stakeholders.
He disclosed that investment cases had been developed for four states to demonstrate the potential health and economic benefits of scaling up maternal health interventions.
Using Kano State as an example, he said projections showed that targeted investments over four years could save about 5,500 lives and reduce the state’s maternal mortality ratio from 352 to 110 deaths per 100,000 live births.
Adeyanju added that failure to invest adequately in maternal health could cost Nigeria an estimated $206 billion, stressing that the government needed to present healthcare investments in economic terms to attract more domestic private sector financing.
He said businesses and investors were more likely to respond when the health sector demonstrated how reducing mortality and improving healthcare outcomes could contribute to economic growth.
The Director of the Nigeria Office of the Gates Foundation, Uche Amaonwu, said maternal deaths remained a major challenge despite the availability of proven interventions capable of saving women’s lives.
He said the difficulty was ensuring that such interventions reached women consistently, at scale and with the quality of care required.
Amaonwu described MAMII as an important nationally led initiative, stressing that the private sector should be regarded not merely as a source of funding but as a partner in solving healthcare challenges.
According to him, businesses could contribute innovation, technology and other capabilities to strengthen the delivery of maternal healthcare services.
He said the success of the compact should ultimately be measured by whether mothers and newborns received the appropriate care at the right time.
At the state level, the Kwara State Commissioner for Health, Dr Amina Ahmed El-Imam, said MAMII was helping to save the lives of vulnerable women who would otherwise struggle to afford emergency maternal healthcare.
She said the initiative had given women greater confidence in accessing healthcare, particularly during childbirth, by demonstrating that government-backed interventions could provide support when families faced life-threatening emergencies.
El-Imam illustrated the impact with the story of a woman who went into labour without money for transportation to a hospital and was subsequently informed that she required an emergency caesarean section.
She said the woman feared she would die because she could not afford the procedure, but survived after receiving the necessary care under the programme.
According to her, the woman, her newborn, spouse and other children were covered by health insurance, allowing her to leave the hospital without being asked to make payment.
El-Imam said such experiences demonstrated the human impact of MAMII beyond statistics, particularly for women from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Similarly, the Abia State Commissioner for Health, Prof. Uche, said MAMII had significantly improved the state’s maternal health outcomes, describing it as one of the most impactful interventions in the state’s healthcare reform programme.
He said Abia’s maternal mortality profile had improved, placing the state among those with the lowest maternal mortality levels in the country.
Uche attributed the progress partly to the integration of MAMII into the healthcare reform agenda of Governor Alex Otti and the introduction of a digital system known as CITRAC to track high-risk pregnancies.
He explained that the digital tool enabled health officials to identify women with high-risk pregnancies, monitor them and link them to appropriate healthcare facilities.
He cited the case of a pregnant teenager in a rural community who had been abandoned but was identified through the tracking system, followed up by health workers and successfully delivered in a health facility.
The commissioner said the state was working to expand the initiative beyond its pilot local government area to cover all local government areas.
He also emphasised the importance of community participation in sustaining the programme, saying the state had engaged women’s groups, men and community leaders to address barriers to maternal healthcare access.
He, however, called for honest assessment of the programme’s performance and sustainability, stressing that government must be transparent about its achievements and remaining challenges.
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