LBS, ABCHealth partner, canvass closing gaps in Nigeria’s healthcare sector

LBS, ABCHealth partner, canvass closing gaps in Nigeria’s healthcare sector

A partnership between Lagos Business School Special Breakfast Club and African Business Coalition for Health (ABCHealth) with the support of the LBS Sustainability Centre, has canvassed for the closure of the gaps that currently exist in Nigeria’s healthcare sector.

Brought under the umbrella of the monthly thought leadership breakfast series of the Club, the partnership used the November session to focus on the healthcare sector and the abundant opportunities in it for long term investments under the theme: ‘New Opportunities in Sustainable Health Investments’.

Attended by LBS alumni, C-suite executives, business leaders and friends of LBS, discussions focused on the potential of private sector-led actions to revolutionise health care delivery at all levels in Nigeria with conversation serving as a catalyst for long-term health solutions driven by sustainable investment models, with the aim of transforming healthcare service delivery not only in Nigeria but across the entire continent.

Speakers, including Olusoji Adeyi, president, Resilient Health Systems, and Lesley-Anne Long, president and chief executive officer of GBC Health, zeroed in on the challenges, impact and business opportunities in Nigeria’s healthcare and health services sector while urging the private sector in attendance to mobilise domestic resources to build a healthcare architecture that will create health resilience for the country and the continent.

Providing economic context to the theme, Bismarck Rewane, chief executive officer, Financial Derivatives Company Limited, provided pointers on the general outlook of the economy. Zouera Youssoufou, chief executive officer, Aliko Dangote Foundation, and Mories Atoki, chief executive officer, ABCHealth, also spoke at the session.

Oluseyi Adeyi, citing the Doing Health Index (DHI), said Nigeria is a Low-Middle Income Country (LMIC) that ranks 20th out of Africa’s 54 economies in terms of Gross National Income (GNI per capita) yet ranks 46th out of Africa’s 54 countries on the DHI, noting that its score approximates the performance of Niger and Liberia.

According to him, Nigeria is the only LMIC economy to score below 50 percent, and that measured on GNI per capita, Nigeria has at least triple the level of income per capita of all but one of the 10 African countries that scored below 50 percent. He noted that Southern Africa is the continent’s highest scoring region, with an aggregate country score across all 4 categories of 73 percent, but nevertheless, that scores vary between the different categories: from a high of 84% (for Affordability) to a low of 61% (for Architecture), a 23-point swing.

Adeyi pointed out that 14 percent of all global business opportunities in the health sector worldwide are in Africa, and that between 2010 and 2020, Africa’s pharmaceutical industry grew at 10 percent annually. Also, the African population of 1.3 billion and a GDP of $3.4 trillion creates economies of scale for pharmaceutical production and trade.

For Lesley-Anne Long, who earmarked the challenges plaguing Nigeria’s healthcare sector, such as infrastructure, digital health and health inequality, investing in your [private sector operators] health makes sense for business, boosting the brand, bottomline and market share via innovation. She spotlighted global case studies and identified the opportunities for collaboration that exist in the health space.

She noted that despite previous efforts, obstacles such as inadequate funding for infrastructure and healthcare workers’ welfare, limited coverage in rural areas, and isolated actions have hindered significant progress, adding that it has become imperative to design and implement new models that improve health outcomes at all levels of healthcare, providing high-quality services that adhere to global standards in an economically and socially sustainable manner.

Chris Ogbechie, a professor, convener of LBS Special Breakfast Club Meeting Series, and the dean, Lagos Business School, called on members of the LBS Breakfast Club, and the organised private sector to put their money where their mouth is by collaborating to shape the future of healthcare in Nigeria and beyond.