This week the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Health, USAID, and the HFG Project are delivering a Healthcare Financing Capacity-Building Workshop for health officials from around Nigeria. The impetus was a Presidential Summit held in Abuja in March 2014 that issued a ‘Declaration on Universal Health Coverage in Nigeria.’ The declaration recognized that Universal Health Coverage (UHC) “… holds the key to unlocking the door for equitable, qualitative and universally accessible healthcare for all Nigerians without suffering financial hardship.”

This workshop aims to update country officials on the available tools, technologies, methods and options to scale up the transition toward UHC, and to End Preventable Childhood and Maternal Deaths.  The workshop builds upon and incorporates the curriculum and materials from the regional health financing training that HFG piloted for 10 sub-Saharan African countries in June 2014 in Tanzania.

The focus is on communicating the basics of health economics and finance and applying these concepts to financing UHC and EPCMD services on a sustainable basis.  Key topics covered include risk pooling, revenue generation, fiscal space, and benefits package design. Group work will engage Nigerian officials to debate the suitability and feasibility of possible options to improve performance in the Nigerian context. Forty Ministry of Health staff from both the federal and state level government are participating. The workshop was organized and delivered by a collaborative team made up of USAID/Africa Bureau Office of Sustainable Development (AFR/SD), HFG, Nigerian FMOH, University of Nigeria, PharmAccess, and the Joint Learning Network.