For more than two decades, the leadership behind Healthcare Access Covenant Foundation has contributed to Nigeria’s Universal Health Coverage (UHC) movement through research, policy engagement, and published work on health financing and reform. Healthcare Access Covenant Foundation (HAC) now has been entablished to translate Universal Health Coverage from national policy aspiration into structured, community-level implementation. We align our work with Nigeria’s health sector reform agenda, the mandate of the National Health Insurance Authority, and the global UHC principles advanced by the World Health Organization. We make attainment of Sustainable Development Goal 3 our strategic goal. Our focus begins in Ekiti State, with the ambition to develop a scalable model for Southwestern Nigeria.  This can be franchised to cover entire Nigeria.

We are Moving Universal Health Coverage from Policy to People.

Our unique approach is to combine four mechanisms of a health system: health infrastructure, health personnel, health financing, people involvement,  into a Modular System that is sustainable, scalable and population focused.

We combine the following processes into an integrated Modular health system:

i, health financing, using membership contributions of Mutual Health Associations, operating as a ooperative organisation as a pre-paid health insurance premium,

ii, delivering health services using Modules of health personnel consistening Community Key Workers, nurses and doctors, Task Sharing and Task Shifting, and having responsibility for a specified number of people,

iii, operating Open Walk-In Clinics in people's neigbourhood health infrastructure,

iv, involving local members of the community in several respects: In governance as members of Mutual Health Association Committees, as members of Clinical and Ethical Committees, in healthcare delivery by retired health personnel, or in social support by transporting ill people from the Clinics to hospitals, if necessary.

In this health system, the role of the people extends beyond going to the clinic for treatment.

The data base of the enrolled members provide a fertile sample population for clinical and epidemiological research. 

We want to ensure that the mother in rural Ekiti has the same access to equitable, evidence based primary health care as those in our national policy papers.

We want to ensure that vulnerable people are not subjected to catastrophic out-of-pocket medical expenditures as envisaged in the federal government policy papers.

We want to bridge the gap between national policy and rural dwellers by making every one of them to join a Mutual Health Association in their immediate neighbourhood so that Primary Healthcare services can be delivered to them neighourhood by neighborhood.

​"Moving from the Library to the Village Square"

​For over two decades, I have watched from the halls of academia as Health For All passed Nigeria by; as Nigeria failed to achieve any of the millennium development goals and as Universal Health Coverage, UHC, movement appears to be stagnating until a robust national mandate breathed life into it. With this new momentum, a question keeps haunting me: When will the mother in the rural settlement feel the impact of these policies?

​Healthcare Access Covenant Foundation (HAC) is my answer to that question.

​We are not here to reinvent the wheel. We are here to make it turn . We are in pursuit of Sustainable Development Goal 3.8. We espouse a solution to the last mile conundrum.

The challenge of the last mile is particularly stark in Ekiti ​despite a mandatory community health insurance scheme enacted into law in 2006. In Ekiti , we still see the life of a road traffic accident victim depending not on a functioning health system, but on the desperate, ad-hoc donations of his townsmen.

​We have documented the solution to the "last-mile" conundrum: The Strategic Path to Universal Health Coverage in Nigeria (ISBN 9789789611731) and Financing Universal Health Coverage in Nigeria (ISBN 9789789613724). We are now mounting non-party partisan but practical steps to bring policy to the reality of remote men and women in Ekiti; To vulnerable poor people in Ekiti; To everyone living below poverty line in Ekiti. 

 Why are starting in Ekiti? 

We have chosen Ekiti State as our starting point—not just because of its intellectual heritage, but also because of the alluring characteristics of the people of Ekiti people. These coupled with the excellent but forgotten law on mandatory community health insurance scheme that requires all residents to belong to a contributory scheme, make Ekiti a perfect laboratory for a scalable and self-sufficient model of primary health care based universal health coverage that we espouse.

​When we succeed in Ekiti, we provide a blueprint for all of Southwestern Nigeria, and indeed the whole of Nigeria.

Clarion call

​We invite you to join us. Whether you are a policymaker, a retired health worker, a government official, a traditional ruler, a neighbourhood high chief, a philanthropist, a donor or a grant administrator, your partnership with us is the final ingredient in translating "Health for All" from a long term slogan into an immediate lived reality for every Nigerian.

​Prof. Laofe Ogundipe, FRCPsych, London.

Founder, Healthcare Access Covenant Foundation