Nigeria must institutionalise long-term, dedicated healthcare financing to sustain the country’s emerging healthcare industrial boom and secure its ambition of becoming a regional manufacturing hub, a Professor of Pharmacy, Lere Baale, has said.
Baale spoke at the Codix Group Dinner in Lagos on Sunday, themed ‘Sustaining Nigeria’s Healthcare Industrial Boom:
The Need for Dedicated Healthcare Funding’, where he described Nigeria’s current healthcare transformation as historic but fragile, warning that without deliberate financial architecture, recent gains could stall.
He said the country was witnessing a quiet but profound shift from dependence on imports to local value creation, with indigenous pharmaceutical manufacturers expanding capacity, diagnostic firms investing in local assembly and innovation, improved regulatory confidence, returning skilled professionals, and stronger regional and global partnerships.
According to him, the progress was driven by lessons from global supply chain disruptions, the COVID-19 pandemic, foreign exchange volatility and more intentional regulatory alignment with national industrial priorities.
“What we are witnessing is not just growth; it is industrial possibility — the emergence of healthcare as a strategic pillar of national development,” Baale said.
However, he warned that the absence of structured, long-term and affordable healthcare-specific financing posed a major threat to sustainability, noting that healthcare manufacturing is capital-intensive, with long gestation periods, heavy regulatory requirements and dependence on advanced technology and skilled manpower.
“A healthcare industrial boom without dedicated funding is like a factory without power — it may exist, but it cannot operate optimally,” he said.
Baale stressed that medicines, diagnostics and medical consumables must be treated as strategic national assets rather than ordinary commodities, arguing that dedicated healthcare funding would stabilise supply, improve quality and compliance, create high-value jobs, protect national security and attract global investment.
He outlined a seven-point framework to institutionalise sustainable healthcare financing, including a call to increase the Basic Healthcare Provision Fund from the current one per cent to three per cent of consolidated government revenue to reflect healthcare’s importance to productivity and national security.
He proposed that the expanded fund be domiciled with the Bank of Industry in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Health, supported by structured Medipool arrangements at state and local government levels to ensure transparent and timely disbursement.
The professor also urged strict payment discipline across the healthcare value chain, recommending a guaranteed payment turnaround of not more than 30 days to improve cash-flow predictability, which he described as critical for manufacturing sustainability.
Baale further called for the establishment of a revolving healthcare fund to ensure continuity and long-term capital availability, rather than reliance on one-off interventions, alongside a guaranteed sales and offtake framework to provide market assurance, encourage capacity expansion and support quality improvements.
“These measures would create a mutually reinforcing architecture — securing reliable supply for government, enabling sustainable scale for industry, reducing risk for banks, attracting investor confidence and ultimately improving access to quality healthcare products and services for Nigerians,” he said.
He urged banks to evolve into development partners, policymakers to treat healthcare as infrastructure investment rather than expenditure, regulators to continue balancing safety with growth, and institutional investors to recognise healthcare as a long-term value sector.
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