Despite the massive migration of medical personnel out of Nigeria, the country’s diaspora still has a key role to play in Africa’s most populous nation’s healthcare transformation.
In Nigeria’s healthcare sector, it is well known that many doctors jump at the first exit opportunity from the country in search of greener pastures seeking better work conditions and pay abroad.
The World Health Organisation recommends a doctor to about 600 people. Nigeria currently has about 35,000 doctors serving a country with an estimated 200 million people. This implies the country still needs about 237,000 doctors.
According to the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority it is estimated that Nigeria spends $1bn on outbound medical tourism each year. However, what the healthcare sector loses in service delivery, talents and human resource can be gained in investment opportunities and remittances from abroad.
For countries with a large diaspora population such as Nigeria, doctors and other healthcare personnel’s are significant part of influencing the healthcare space and creating opportunities to explore an available resource for development in the sector.
Experts see Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Nigeria as a necessary medium for deals in hospitals and clinics to enhance treatment abilities, improve in medical technologies advancement are a booming development and boost the healthcare services in Nigeria.
“Attracting FDI into the healthcare sector requires deliberate policy work by Government with regards industrialisation and FDI in order to ensure that investors are attracted to the healthcare industry. This could start with including healthcare into the National Industrial Revolution Plan among other similar tools utilised to drive investments into the country,” Chibuzo Opara co-founder of Drugstoc said.
Analysts say Nigeria’s health sector remains a good and attractive industry to do business in, with huge opportunities and high-profit margin up to 70 percent.
More investment will bridge the noticeable gap and also help in eliminating the issue of medical tourism, analysts say.
“FDI has an act in Nigeria health sector as it influences why the country has some hospitals and diagnostic centres with expensive high-tech equipment that are non-existent or broken down in many government hospitals, said Doyin Odubanjo, chairman, Association of Public Health Physicians of Nigeria, Lagos Chapter.
The net effect of migration of skilled labour is negative, more so if what these medical personnel’s send back is money for building specialist facilities, upgrading and collaborating with the Governments. But now the message is clear – Nigeria needs to take advantage of its departed labour more by using direct diaspora investments.
Nigeria’s medical device market will record double-digit growth in local currency and will grow at a 2017-2022 CAGR of 9 percent to reach $184.4 million by 2022 and predicts healthcare expenditure to reach N5,762.061bn by 2021 at CAGR of 8.35%, says the report by Fitch Solutions.
To take advantage of the growing interest, these experts say for Nigerians in diaspora more personnel’s can harness the available opportunities and as well as private healthcare providers extend well beyond the pharmaceuticals, hospital establishment can key into more importations in highest demand of supplying magnetic resonance imaging, radiotherapy machines, digital X-ray, ultrasound and mammography machines, CT- Scans and anesthesia kits. These areas hold great potential as Nigeria looks to expand health care access and coverage
“The Nigerian medical device market will witness a strong growth rate in the medium to long-term future is driven by improved economic conditions and the introduction of a foray of new companies with technological advancements,” Research and Markets also predicts.
Nigeria is expected to grow more in the share medical device market. This is owing to rising intravenous usage of technology in the state and the rising cost of healthcare, which stimulated the development of innovative connected products.
According to the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission, a myriad of investment opportunities exist across the healthcare value chain in Nigeria and investors interested in taking advantage of these opportunities will benefit from taking a long-term view of the market and keeping into consideration the dynamics of healthcare investment in developing nations.
The United States of America, (USA) based healthcare expert and a leading member of the League of Nigerians in Diaspora, LNID, Shegun Olagundoye urged that investors and professionals in the Diaspora to return home to invest in the large potentials that abound in the nation’s medical tourism and other sectors of the economy.
“With the current favourable investment environment, if our compatriots heed this call, Nigerians in Diaspora can turn the country to a global medical tourism center within the next seven to ten years.”
“Nigeria government should starts looking at regulations that make things easier especially for the field of medicine where it is so unique that is very hard to get these products any other way than to bring it outside the country for now,” Hammed Ninalowo, a vascular and interventional radiologist said.
ANTHONIA OBOKOH
