The Society for Family Health has announced plans to support the enrolment of 1.9 million people living with HIV into Nigeria’s national health insurance scheme.
The organisation’s Managing Director, Dr Omokhudu Idogho, made this known in a statement released on Friday. He said the initiative is part of a broader effort to strengthen access to care for people living with HIV, tuberculosis, and family planning services under the National Health Insurance Authority.
Idogho said the next phase of implementation would focus on mapping insurance accredited health facilities that provide HIV, TB and family planning services. He added that the programme would also support the treatment of an estimated 500,000 tuberculosis cases each year under the insurance scheme.
According to him, SFH will help strengthen the supply of medicines and medical commodities and improve logistics for HIV, TB and family planning services within the insurance framework. He said the organisation will also support the National Health Insurance Authority in improving quality assurance systems to ensure compliance with national and global best practices.
He recalled that in March 2023, SFH and NHIA jointly held a multi stakeholder workshop to design service packages for HIV, TB and family planning services under health insurance. He said the meeting led to the creation of technical working groups to refine the framework.
By June 2023, SFH engaged an international health actuary to collect cost data from health facilities across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones. He said the model built from this data was later validated by stakeholders and adopted by NHIA to revise the national basic minimum healthcare package.
Idogho said the services were also fully integrated into the updated Basic Health Care Provision Fund, now known as BHCPF 2.0, following reviews by the Ministerial Oversight Committee.
He said SFH has worked in Nigeria for over 40 years on HIV, TB, malaria and reproductive health, but declining donor funding made it necessary to push for sustainable domestic financing.
According to him, the organisation signed a Memorandum of Understanding with NHIA in February 2023 to provide technical support for benefit design, actuarial analysis and resource mobilisation.
He added that SFH recently recognised the Director General of NHIA, Dr Kelechi Ohiri, for his leadership in expanding HIV, TB and family planning services under the insurance scheme.
Nigeria has one of the highest HIV burdens in the world, with between 1.8 million and 2 million people living with the virus. As foreign funding from programmes such as PEPFAR and the Global Fund declines, the Federal Government has increasingly shifted focus toward using health insurance to sustain critical public health services.
The revised National Health Insurance Act of 2022 made insurance mandatory and expanded the mandate of NHIA to cover essential health services, including HIV, TB and reproductive health.
