Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria (PHN) leverages private sector innovation to supports Nigerian government to improve outcomes, build a public private coalition to save at least 1 million lives of women and children.
Also, it is to distil lessons from millennium development goals (MDGs) experience and lunge forward to achieve critical milestones in moving the Universal Health Care (UHC) of Nigeria’s health sector.
At a closeout ceremony conducted by the PHN yesterday in Lagos, being the inaugural edition of the Health Innovation Development Accelerator Programme (HiDAP) that graduated eight winners and finalists from the concluded 2015 health innovation. The outcome of the HiDAP classes is for participants to be inaugurated into the Nigeria Health Innovation Marketplace
Jim Ovia, chairman, Zenith Bank plc, and co-chair, PHN, said the alliance had created the Nigeria Health Innovation Marketplace as a convergence platform to spur innovation and connect actors in the innovation eco-system.
“As we may know, while some progress has been recorded, current rates show marginal reduction in maternal and child mortality,” Ovia said, noting that, in order to see considerable improvements in the country’s health outcomes, there was need to rethink the way health sector challenges were addressed.
The PHN, led by business leaders in Nigeria including myself, Aliko Dangote, Aigboje Aig-Imokhuede, and others, was set up as a private sector-led coalition to complement government efforts in the Saving One Million Lives Initiative (SOML) and mobilise Nigeria’s broader private sector through a coordinated platform, to dramatically improve health outcomes through innovation and partnerships.
Muntaqa Umar Sadiq, CEO of PHN, said all the years many had donated to this, but we have not seen a constant result, we have to rethink, come together to put resources together to have private sector that focus on innovation.
“The HiDAP is tailored to provide support to select innovations; the programme is designed using a user-centred approach to ensure innovations for additional investments and advance their innovation scale,’’ Umar said.
In 2015, PHN through the innovation marketplace conducted the first ever in-country health innovation challenge, to identify, reward and support promising innovations addressing key challenges in the health sector, specifically focusing on saving the lives of mothers and children.
Chibuzor Okpara, co-founder of IntegraHealth, in his presentation ‘Navigating the Nigeria healthcare innovation space in drugstoc,’ said 90 percent of start-ups fail within 5 years, but innovation was what can make it start up again.
He further said that in a business, one need strategy to achieve success, continuity of business idea was the motive of innovation.
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