New Self-Care Award Supports Universal Health Coverage in Nigeria

We are pleased to announce our new project, the Self-Care Accelerator Project (S-CAP), to accelerate achievement of universal health coverage by promoting the use and scale-up of self-care interventions in Nigeria.

In Nigeria, there is limited access to health services through the conventional health system due to several barriers. These barriers have created an increasing demand for innovative strategies that will advance primary healthcare and contribute to universal health coverage. Self-care interventions support health systems by providing promising approaches to increase coverage and access, reduce health disparities, increase quality of services, improve health, human rights, and social outcomes, and reduce cost and provide more efficient use of healthcare resources.

Nigeria is the first country in Africa to develop the National Self Care Guideline for Sexual, Reproductive and Maternal Health, drawing on the WHO guidelines on Self-care interventions for health and well-being. S-CAP will support the FMOH to accelerate this national self-care agenda in Nigeria, to put in place systems for full scale up of self-care. In doing so, it will also serve as an exemplar with lessons to inform global programming in self-care

Self-care holds the promise of shifting the paradigm from overly dependence on health systems, reducing the bludgeoning healthcare cost and burden on providers, by empowering individuals to carry out simple health solutions.” Adewole Adefalu, JSI Technical Advisor.

This activity leverages JSI’s more than 40 years of family planning, new product introduction and monitoring, evaluation and learning expertise.