The Minister of State for Health and Social Welfare, Iziaq Salako, says that Nigeria is facing a deteriorating health workforce problem as more and more medical personnel leave the nation, putting even more stress on the country’s already weak healthcare system.
Reports from The PUNCH said that Salako sounded the alarm yesterday while giving a keynote speech at the Royal College of Physicians in London during the 2026 United Kingdom Global Health Summit.
The minister claimed that the “japa” of Nigerian health personnel has made the country’s health system even more stressed and caused a lot of stress.
Salako said in a speech that our correspondent in Abuja got a copy of that Nigeria only has roughly four doctors for every 10,000 people, which is much lower than the World Health Organization’s recommendation of at least 10 doctors for every 10,000 people.
Salako added, “The global health workforce crisis is not a threat for the future; it is an emergency right now.” Africa has more than a quarter of the world’s diseases, yet it has less than three percent of the world’s health workers.
He also said that the situation was especially bad in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, where there was a shocking lack of physicians, nurses, midwives, and other health workers.
The minister said that the country’s lack of workers had gotten much worse since healthcare workers had moved away.
He stated that between 2021 and 2022, some 13,609 Nigerian health workers moved to the UK, making Nigeria one of the biggest sources of foreign-trained medical staff in the country.
He also talked about a 2023 study by NOI Polls and Nigeria Health Watch that indicated that 57% of Nigerian doctors have made plans to leave the nation in search of better job possibilities abroad.
Salako says that every doctor trained in Nigeria is a big investment of public money.
“Every doctor that leaves Nigeria takes with them a lot of public money that has been committed, frequently more than $200,000 for training.
He noted that this “effectively transfers resources from one of the world’s most resource-constrained health systems to wealthier nations.”
He said that the trend is a question of fairness for everyone and that countries need to work together to fix it.
For a long time, Nigeria’s health care system has had problems with not having enough money, not having enough infrastructure, and relying too much on patients paying out of their own pockets.
Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, with more than 220 million people. However, its healthcare system still has a lot of problems, such as bad facilities, not enough workers, and not enough access to good care, especially in rural areas.
Experts have often cautioned that the ongoing movement of healthcare workers could make it even harder for public hospitals to provide good care.
Salako said at the conference that the federal government, led by Bola Tinubu, had started reforms to improve the sector through the Nigeria Health Sector Renewal Investment Initiative. This is a plan to bring together health policies and funding into one framework.
He said that the idea was based on the ideas of “One Plan, One Budget, and One Conversation,” which were meant to make health sector spending more coordinated and accountable.
Salako also talked about other problems around the world that are hurting healthcare systems, like unstable economies, climate change, and tensions between countries.
He said that the International Monetary Fund had predicted that the world’s economy will grow by only 2.7 to 3.1 percent in 2026, which is lower than it was before the epidemic. This might make it much harder for the government to spend money on healthcare.
Climate change is also already having an effect on health around the world.
The 2025 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change says that deaths from heat have gone up by 23 percent since 1999, and harsh weather has made millions of people food insecure.
In Nigeria, environmental problems include deserts in the North, flooding in the South, and pollution in oil-producing areas are making illness outbreaks and people having to move more common.
Salako noted that to deal with the lack of workers, the government increased the number of training spots in medical schools and other health facilities.
He said that between 2023 and 2025, Nigeria had a 160 percent rise in the number of people who applied to medical school. The same thing happened with the training of nurses, pharmacists, and lab scientists.
He stated that the government was also making training for community health workers better and putting in place laws that let people swap tasks to make services better in communities that don’t get enough of them.
He remarked, “We know that a strong health system needs a large and varied workforce.”
The minister claimed that the government was also trying to get Nigerian health specialists who live overseas to help the country’s health sector.
He said that seven Nigerian healthcare diaspora groups from the UK, the US, Canada, Germany, Australia, and South Africa would work together on a medical mission in Nigeria from April to July of this year.
He claimed that the project would focus on sharing knowledge, improving skills, and making health institutions stronger.
There are thought to be more than 150,000 Nigerian health professionals living abroad, and many of them work in high-level positions at hospitals and research institutions.
Salako called them a “strategic asset” that might help fill in the holes in the domestic healthcare system’s capability.
The minister said that countries need to cooperate together more to solve the global health workforce challenge. This includes fair hiring procedures and helping countries that train health workers who then go to other countries.
He advised rich countries to completely follow the WHO Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel, which promotes fair and open hiring processes.
Salako also pushed for agreements between two countries that would let health workers get experience abroad while making sure that their skills and expertise are brought back to their own countries.
“No country can fix the global health workforce challenge on its own. The next health crisis or pandemic won’t care about boundaries.
He said, “Improving health systems in poor countries is not charity; it is global security.”
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