As a research driven organization with focus on exploring both local and international partnership to generate evidence that will guide policy-makers, SDI partnered with the Duke Global Health Institute (DGHI) to conduct this study. The study aims to determine the subnational child healthcare access profiles to improve policy-making and resource allocation for health and investigate the major drivers of disparities in access to child healthcare in Nigeria. A pilot test of the research was conducted in 6 LGAs in Plateau state and now expanding to 6 States in the 3 geopolitical zones of the country.

The research aims to:

Create unique subnational child healthcare access profiles for each of Nigeria’s children to enhance subnational evidence-based child-health policy making.

Using an aggregation of child health data from multiple sources, unlock valuable insights on factors driving geographic and socioeconomic disparities in child survival in Nigeria.

Significance of the Research

Despite recent progress, Nigeria has the second worst under-five mortality rate (U5MR) in the world (117 per 1,000 live births) and contributes the highest annual number of under-five deaths (600,000 children in 2020). To address these poor child survival rates, Nigeria has prioritized access to healthcare for children through its new National Health Act and Basic HealthCareProvision Fund (BHCPF) which provides funding to states and LGs for the expansion of Universal Health Coverage (UHC). But many states face the twin challenges of lack of information at the subnational level, and decreased capacity to customize their expansion plans to fit local disease, demographic, and socioeconomic realities. It is therefore necessary to understand what factors drive these geographic and socioeconomic disparities within the country.