As you are reading this, Amina is in a far off village in Borno State, giving start to her 2d baby on a bare mat in a makeshift refuge. There’ll not be any longer any nurse or access to clean water, no sterile gear or electricity. Her baby may well live to inform the tale, however her chances are slim.
Unfortunately, Amina’s situation displays a broader challenge affecting many Nigerian girls, who face significant challenges in accessing quality healthcare at some stage in pregnancy, childbirth, and beyond.
While girls dominate the healthcare field globally as professionals, they also frequently encounter barriers and biases in accessing quality healthcare for themselves.
The 2025 Gender in Nigeria myth revealed that 71.2% of married girls lacked autonomy in making sexual and reproductive health choices, limiting their ability to make told choices about their bodies and futures.
As the sector commemorates, the International Day of Action for Ladies’s Health, themed, In Solidarity We Withstand: Our Combat, Our Suitable, the global community is raising its say with girls appreciate Amina and other marginalised girls, drawing attention to the rising gaps in access to essential health products and companies and the pressing want to guard and promote girls’s health and rights in Nigeria.
An all-rounder on girls’s health in Nigeria
Nigeria accounts for extra than 28.3% of global maternal deaths, with 1,047 deaths per 100,000 are residing births, which is among the ultimate in the sector. These deaths are preventable and mostly occur on account of a lack of access, socio-cultural reasons and a general lack of the government’s financial commitment to forestall certain causes of maternal deaths.
In 2025, Nigeria’s govt drastically decreased its family planning budget by 97%, allocating most effective ₦66.39 million compared to ₦2.2 billion in 2024. This cutback comes at a time the united stateshas withdrawn funding to UNFPA, which has been vital in providing reproductive health affords, training, and technical fortify.
Socioeconomic factors also play a crucial role in the decline of girls’s health, compounding the challenge beyond appropriate political factors. In a search for published on BMC Ladies’s Health, titled “Barriers to health in women of reproductive age living with or at risk of non-communicable diseases in Nigeria,” girls surveyed emphasised that family and home obligations significantly impacted their ability to manage their health. They illustrious having to attain the heavy domestic work placed on them despite their external work commitments.
A few of the ladies surveyed also reported challenges in maintaining a impartial correct, nutritious food plan, usually relying on side road meals and carbohydrate-wealthy meals appreciate rice, Eba, and yams. They also are vulnerable to prioritise their younger folk’s vitamin, reserving better meals for them and settling for less nutritious alternate choices themselves.
The behold’s participants had been girls from diverse professions, collectively with entrepreneurs, traders, meals sellers, and workplace workers in Lagos and Abuja. Nonetheless, most lacked health insurance, making out-of-pocket healthcare costs a challenge.
A number of the ladies also prioritised basic needs over healthcare, leading to inadequate management of power prerequisites. They reported that they couldn’t afford bulk medication purchases, instead purchasing “one sachet at a time,” which exacerbated health issues appreciate hypertension. They also saw hospital visits as dear and time-drinking on account of lengthy waiting instances, prompting many to self-medicate at local pharmacies instead.
A timid space for preference and say
A recent UN Ladies search for of 411 girls-led and girls’s rights organisations across 44 disaster settings revealed alarming financial challenges for girls’s pattern programmes, collectively with health.
About 90% of the organisation’s reported financial difficulties, with 47% potentially shutting down in the following six months if funding doesn’t fortify.
72% of girls-led organisations have already been pressured to lay off staff, and 51% have suspended essential programming. Healthcare programmes have been hit particularly hard, with 52% significantly affected, additional exacerbating the ladies’s health disaster.
Source: UN Ladies 2025
Nigeria’s healthcare sector is also witnessing a rising disparity in the quantity of male doctors compared to female doctors. The Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Lagos, Rivers, and Oyo States have the ultimate percentages of female doctors, while other states, especially in the northern station, fall below the national average.
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States with fewer female doctors, are vulnerable to have larger maternal mortality rates suggesting that the scarcity of female doctors in these areas contributes to gender biases among medical professionals, potentially impacting girls’s healthcare outcomes.
Reframing girls’s health as a national precedence
To strive for gender equity and uphold girls’s rights, Nigeria must treat girls’s health as a national emergency. This means increasing investments in family planning and sexual and reproductive rights programmes, eliminating socio-cultural barriers that obstruct girls from accessing care and creating spaces for the needs of girls and girls in policymaking.
There is also an pressing want to reform restrictive laws, expand access to safe abortion products and companies, and make obvious that every woman, regardless of her earnings, location, or age, can make told choices about her body and her health.
