The Federal Government has raised concerns over conflicting health statistics in Nigeria, calling for a unified national data system to address discrepancies in figures reported by government agencies and health surveys.

The Minister of State for Health and Social Welfare, Dr Iziaq Salako, said “inconsistent and outdated statistics could undermine health sector planning, policy decisions, resource allocation and the assessment of government interventions.”

Salako spoke on Wednesday in Abuja while declaring open the scientific conference of the 2026 Joint Annual Review of the health sector, themed Make the Data Count.

He said the country needed to move beyond collecting and presenting health data to establishing whether policies and programmes were delivering measurable improvements in people’s health.

“A health system that only reports activity learns slowly, while one that tests its claims in public learns faster,” the minister said.

Salako identified the fragmentation of health data across different agencies and reporting platforms as a major challenge, explaining that the same health indicator often produced different figures because of variations in data sources, reporting periods, definitions and population denominators.

He cited the maternal mortality ratio of “512 deaths per 100,000 live births,” which he said was still being circulated as a current figure despite being based on the 2018 baseline.

The minister also questioned discrepancies in reported skilled birth attendance, antenatal care visits and health insurance coverage.

According to him, “skilled birth attendance stands at about 86 per cent in routine facility reports but 50 per cent in the Mini-Demographic and Health Survey because the former measures facility births while the latter captures all births.”

Similarly, he said, “four antenatal care visits are recorded at 58.5 per cent in the survey but below 30 per cent in some administrative reports.”

Salako added that health insurance coverage was being quoted between 9.5 and 13 per cent, depending on the population base and measurement method.

“This data paradox creates an ecosystem where data is often trapped in silos, leading to conflicting numbers and outdated statistics,” he said.

He warned that increasing health insurance coverage alone would not guarantee improved health outcomes without addressing shortages and the unequal distribution of health workers, essential medicines, electricity and other healthcare infrastructure.

The minister said the scientific conference provided an opportunity for researchers to reconcile the discrepancies through validation studies, facility assessments and independent evaluations of government interventions.

He disclosed that 242 abstracts were submitted for the conference, of which 59 were selected following a peer-review process, comprising 24 oral presentations and 35 poster presentations.

Salako challenged researchers to establish why some health interventions were producing results while others were failing to achieve their objectives.

He specifically cited direct financing of primary healthcare centres, Level 2 facility readiness and emergency transport as interventions requiring further assessment to determine their effectiveness, cost and suitability for expansion.

“For interventions that are working, such as direct financing of primary health centres, Level 2 readiness and emergency transport, define and showcase what explains the gain, whether it holds across zones and social groups, what each additional result costs and what scale-up needs,” he said.

He also urged researchers to investigate whether the poor performance of some programmes resulted from faulty designs, inadequate funding, implementation challenges or weaknesses in measurement.

The minister proposed seven benchmarks for assessing research findings and health sector interventions at the conference and subsequent annual reviews.

They include adopting common definitions and figures for health indicators, using the 2025-2026 Mini-Demographic and Health Survey as a common baseline, and conducting annual assessments of primary healthcare facilities.

He called for a nationally representative assessment of power supply, water, oxygen and essential medicines in the country’s 8,309 directly financed primary healthcare centres and additional facilities being brought into the programme.

He proposed that at least 80 per cent of tracer commodities should be available in Level 2 primary healthcare centres.

Salako also called for a reconciled national health workforce database linking professional regulators with the national registry, insisting that training programmes should be assessed based on workers’ performance and retention rather than the number of people trained.

On health information management, he proposed restoring the completeness and timeliness of District Health Information System 2 reporting to the 2025 levels of 93 and 88 per cent, respectively.

He further called for state-level reporting of laboratory performance, including disease confirmation rates, sample-to-result turnaround time and laboratory information system coverage.

The call for a unified health data system comes as the Federal Government intensifies efforts to implement its Nigeria Health Sector Renewal Investment Initiative, a reform framework designed to address longstanding challenges in healthcare financing, service delivery, governance and access to quality healthcare.

The initiative operates through a Sector-Wide Approach, which seeks to bring federal and state governments, development partners, private sector organisations and other stakeholders under a coordinated framework to reduce fragmented interventions and improve accountability.