It gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to this National Healthcare Electrification Investors Matchmaking Forum, convened under the Nigeria Power for Health Initiative (NPHI). Today’s event marks a significant milestone in the critical agenda to energise our health system, moving from dialogue to concrete plans, from policy discussions to investment decisions; identifying challenges and implementing practical solutions. Our objective is investment promotion towards a functioning market for healthcare electrification in Nigeria.
Last year, we convened the National Stakeholders Dialogue on Power in the Health Sector which brought together leaders from the health, power, finance, digital solutions, environment, development, and private sectors to confront one undeniable reality that; Energy poverty is holding back our reforms and slowing down our healthcare transformation agenda. The outcome of that dialogue was clear, we agreed that Nigeria needed a structured, coordinated, and sustainable mechanism to address the energy challenges facing our healthcare facilities. From that dialogue emerged the Nigeria Power for Health Initiative, approved by the President and Commander in Chief of Nigeria Armed Force, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR and now formally institutionalized as the national platform for driving healthcare electrification in Nigeria. Today, we gather to advance the next phase of that vision.
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,
Electricity is not merely a utility in a healthcare facility. Like Human Resources for Health, it is a compulsory driver of the health system. It powers operating theatres during life-saving surgeries; keeps vaccines potent through reliable cold chain systems; powers incubators that sustain premature babies; enables diagnostics, blood banking services, oxygen delivery systems, digital health technologies, and emergency response services. When electricity fails, healthcare delivery stagnates.
Across Nigeria, many of our healthcare facilities continue to struggle with unreliable power supply with grid outages, voltage fluctuations, and rising diesel costs becoming a limiting factor and persistent operational challenge. In most facilities, energy expenditure consumes a substantial proportion of operating revenues, diverting scarce resources away from patient care, workforce development, essential medicines procurement, and equipment maintenance.
The consequences are measured not only in financial losses but in compromised health outcomes, reduced service availability, increased operational risks, and diminished public trust in our health system. Reliable energy therefore remains one of the most important investments we should make in strengthening healthcare delivery and improving health outcomes.
Distinguished Guests, The Nigeria Power for Health Initiative (NPHI) was established to address this challenge sustainably and at scale. For decades, healthcare electrification efforts have largely relied on government-funded projects and donor-supported asset deployment. While many of these interventions were well intentioned, experience has shown that this model has not produced the long last solution that our health systems requires.
Too often, systems were procured, commissioned, and celebrated, scrathching only the surface and deteriorating fast due to inadequate operations and maintenance arrangements, weak accountability structures, and unsustained lifecycle financing. The result has been an expensive cycle of installation, degradation, replacement, and renewed dependence on emergency solutions.
The NPHI was designed to break that cycle. At its core, is the introduction of a decisive shift away from historically inadequate public and donor-funded asset delivery models toward a public-sector-led, private-sector-driven, service-based financing architecture. Instead of focusing primarily on asset ownership, we are promoting a model that prioritizes service delivery, system performance, accountability, and long-term sustainability.
Under this framework, healthcare facilities are no longer expected to become energy companies. Rather, specialized Energy Service Providers are expected to finance, deploy, operate, maintain, and guarantee energy services, while health institutions focus on their core mandate of delivering quality healthcare to Nigerians. This Energy-as-a-Service approach aligns incentives appropriately and is designed to reward operators for performance and reliability. Healthcare facilities receive dependable and cost effective energy services. Ultimately, investors gain access to predictable revenue streams, the people benefits from improved service delivery and government faces reduced fiscal pressure.
Let me at this point highlight that while we at this phase of NPHI focusing on federal tertiary health institutions, the initiative is about powering the entire Nigerian health system is a sustainable, cost effective, environment friendly and reliable way. The NPHI is therefore being designed to support primary, secondary and tertiary levels of healthcare at both the public and private sectors. We will therefore work with states and local government and the private healthcare sector to ensure that lessons learnt from this phase are utilised to deliver a national solution to energy poverty in the health sector.
Distinguished Participants,
In order to ensure credibility which is the tonic for investment decisions, the NPHI has invested considerable effort in establishing a robust governance and accountability framework. Governance of the Initiative is coordinated by the Inter-Ministerial Steering Committee (IMSC) which provides strategic oversight, policy direction, and alignment across key sectors including health, power, finance, and environment. Supporting the IMSC is a 24-member Inter-Agency Technical Committee (IATC), technical engine room of the initiative responsible for developing action plans, evaluating proposals, aligning technical strategies, ensuring technical quality, and promoting financial sustainability. At the operational level, Facility Energy Management Teams (FEMTs) are being established within healthcare facilities to oversee energy planning, performance monitoring, data management, and sustainability arrangements.
Anchoring this structure is a dedicated Project Secretariat under the supervision of the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, responsible for coordination, stakeholder engagement, programme monitoring, and implementation support. This governance architecture has been deliberately designed to provide transparency, accountability, technical rigor, and secure investors confidence.
The NPHI is therefore pursuing a financing strategy built on blended finance, risk sharing, project aggregation, and long-term sustainability. We are exploring mechanisms that combine government commitment, development finance, climate finance, concessional capital, and private investment into a unified framework capable of unlocking large-scale deployment.
At this juncture, I wish to acknowledge our strategic partners — the United Kingdom Partnership for Accelerating Climate Transition (UK PACT) and Landell Mills International — for their invaluable support. Through this partnership, we are building a structured national framework that anchors the Nigeria Power for Health Initiative and strengthens our broader efforts to ensure sustainable energy access. This collaboration recognizes a vital truth: healthcare electrification is not only an engineering challenge, it is also a financing, governance, and sustainability challenge.
Only two weeks ago, we convened a Finance and Investment Mobilization Workshop for Directors of Finance and Accounts of Federal Tertiary Hospitals who are central to ensuring financial sustainability. The workshop moved our institutions from passive recipients of infrastructure to credible participants in investment discussions. Participants were trained in energy economics, project finance, sustainable business models, and investor engagement. They were challenged to see energy not as a recurrent cost, but as a strategic asset. Indeed, many of the opportunities that will be presented today come from institutions whose finance teams have already begun developing investment memoranda and business cases.
On behalf of the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, I express deep appreciation to UK PACT and Landell Mills for their continued partnership and commitment.
Distinguished Investors and Development Partners,
The opportunity before us is significant. Healthcare electrification sits at the intersection of health security, climate resilience, economic development, gender equity, and sustainable infrastructure. It is an opportunity to improve health outcomes while reducing emissions, to strengthen public services while creating private sector value and to reduce dependence on costly diesel generation while unlocking long-term operational savings. Most importantly, it is an opportunity to ensure that healthcare facilities remain functional when lives depend on them.
The NPHI is not seeking a single type of investor or a single financing solution. Healthcare electrification is an ecosystem — and its success depends on diverse financing actors working together. For commercial banks, development finance institutions, infrastructure funds, impact investors, and climate financiers, the Initiative offers a growing pipeline of projects that can be supported through debt, equity, blended finance, guarantees, green bonds, and climate funds. For development partners and technical assistance providers, there are opportunities to strengthen project preparation, feasibility studies, business case development, and institutional capacity. And critically, investment is needed not only in infrastructure, but in systems and people — building the teams, standards, and governance structures that ensure these assets deliver value throughout their lifecycle.
The Federal Government cannot achieve this transformation alone. We need development finance institutions willing to provide catalytic capital, commercial banks willing to support innovative financing structures, institutional investors willing to invest in long-term infrastructure solutions and energy developers willing to deploy world-class technologies and service models. We need our sub-national governments and healthcare institutions to come on board and embrace sustainable energy planning and management. And we need development partners willing to continue supporting this journey from concept to scale.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Today’s Investors Matchmaking Forum is therefore not the end of a conversation, it is the beginning of a marketplace. A marketplace where ideas become projects, where projects become investments, where investments become reliable electricity, and where reliable electricity springboard better healthcare services and outcomes for millions of Nigerians.
I encourage all participants to engage actively throughout today’s sessions, explore partnership opportunities, and identify practical pathways for collaboration. Let us move beyond discussions toward execution, beyond pilots to scale and beyond fragmented interventions toward a sustainable national system. On behalf of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the father of our nation, I want to affirm the full commitment of the Federal Government of Nigeria to ensuring that the health system is sustainably powered working in full partnership with the private sector. I assure you, our potential investors that the Federal government will ensure all necessary policy enablements and guarantees to give you comfort.
Together, we can build a future where every healthcare facility in Nigeria has access to reliable, affordable, and sustainable energy. Together, we can strengthen our healthcare system. Together, we can save lives. And so with peace and plenty, Nigeria shall be blessed. Thank you for your attention.
Facebook Comments Box