National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with four institutions to provide training and capacity building for management staff of the organisations.
The institutions are the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Strategic Purchasing Africa Resource Centre, Kenya, and the Enterprise Development Centre, Pan Atlantic University, Lagos.
At the signing of the MoU in Abuja, the director-general of the Authority, Prof Mohammed Nasir-Sambo, said the training is necessitated by limited capacity to drive health insurance in the country.
He said, “We are building capacity for the managers and implementers of this programme so that they can be able to manage well with some degree of efficiency.
“There is limited capacity to drive health insurance in Nigeria and therefore we need to have a very concrete arrangement that can help in building human capital within the health insurance ecosystem.”
The country representative, Results for Development (R4D), Dr Hope Uwaija, said the organisation is providing technical support to the NHIA to train and build capacity for middle and senior level staff of the authority towards attaining Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in the country.
“So, what you see today is a collaborative effort made possible by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who are funding this particular exercise as a way of assisting the authority to build its personnel to be able to drive the work going on towards achieving UHC in the country,” he said.