Nigeria’s push to produce more of its medicines, vaccines, medical products and nutrition commodities locally is both an economic and a health security imperative. Recent disruptions to global supply chains have repeatedly exposed the risks of depending heavily on imported health commodities. Building domestic production capacity can reduce that vulnerability, create jobs, strengthen industrial capability and keep more value within the Nigerian economy.
But there is an important question that receives far less attention: who will operate the factories, laboratories and quality systems that this ambition requires?
Local manufacturing is not created by buildings and equipment alone. It depends on people who can formulate products, operate production lines, maintain equipment, conduct quality control, manage cold chains, meet regulatory requirements and run the data systems that modern manufacturing requires. If Nigeria builds production capacity without building the workforce to operate it, the country will have invested in industrial infrastructure without developing the human infrastructure needed to make it productive.
This matters because Nigeria’s healthcare manufacturing ambitions are significant. Through the Presidential Initiative for Unlocking the Healthcare Value Chain (PVAC), government is working to create the enabling environment for increased local production of medicines, vaccines, diagnostics and other health products, while mobilising investment and strengthening the wider healthcare value chain.
A critical part of that ambition is the workforce required to deliver it. Nigeria is seeking to grow its life sciences manufacturing workforce from about 20,000 to 50,000 full-time employees, creating a pipeline for roughly 30,000 additional skilled workers by 2030. That workforce cannot be developed after the factories are built. Training takes time, practical competence takes experience, and a certificate alone does not make someone production-ready. If capital is being mobilised today for facilities that will require skilled workers within the next few years, workforce development must move alongside that investment.
There are already encouraging signs that the broader healthcare investment ecosystem is responding. Through PVAC, a growing pipeline of healthcare businesses is being supported towards investment, alongside efforts to mobilise development finance, facilitate technology transfer and improve the enabling environment for local manufacturers. But capital and equipment alone will not deliver manufacturing capacity. As new facilities are financed and existing manufacturers expand, Nigeria must simultaneously build the technicians, production specialists, quality professionals, regulatory experts and managers required to operate them. Workforce development is therefore not a separate social intervention; it is core infrastructure for healthcare industrialisation.
The challenge is not simply a shortage of graduates. Nigeria produces thousands of graduates across the health and life sciences every year, but many may still lack the practical and technical competencies that an expanding manufacturing sector requires. They may have the relevant academic foundation without the hands-on experience needed to work effectively in a manufacturing environment.
This is why employers need to be at the centre of the workforce pipeline. Manufacturers, distributors and other health sector businesses understand the roles they need, the equipment workers must be able to operate and the competencies required at different levels. Their needs should therefore help shape the training pipeline from the outset, rather than leaving training providers to determine skills requirements in isolation.
The model is straightforward: understand where the jobs are, identify the skills those jobs require, recruit young people against that demand, provide relevant technical training, place them with employers and measure whether they remain in work. The objective is not to produce more certificates. It is to produce people who can contribute productively to the industry.
This is where stronger private sector coordination becomes important. Government has a central role in setting policy, creating the right investment environment and supporting national workforce development. Donors can provide catalytic financing and technical assistance. But neither can fully substitute for employers in defining what an industry actually needs.
A private sector platform that sits across the healthcare value chain can help close that gap by bringing employers and training providers together, aggregating demand and creating clearer pathways into employment. The collaboration between PVAC and the Healthcare Federation of Nigeria (HFN) creates an opportunity to put this approach into practice. PVAC’s workforce agenda is increasingly focused on connecting industry demand, relevant skills and employment pathways, while HFN provides an important platform for engaging employers across the healthcare value chain.
One practical example is Empower Academy Nigeria, established through a 2025 partnership between PVAC and Empower School of Health and officially launched in February 2026. The academy is helping to address industry skills gaps through accessible, industry-relevant training in pharmaceutical management, pharmaceutical manufacturing and GxP, regulatory affairs, validation and supply chain management. Early demand has been encouraging, with registered learners growing from 80 in January 2026 to more than 3,500 by September 2026. The opportunity now is to build on platforms such as Empower Academy and HFN’s Youth Forum to create a more deliberate national pipeline that links training to employer needs, practical experience, placement and ultimately retention in the healthcare industry.
HFN’s own experience with young health professionals points to the same need. Engagement with students and graduates had often been useful but informal, through conference participation, university engagements and other opportunities for exposure. What was missing was a structured pathway connecting young people to mentors, relevant skills and opportunities within the sector. The HFN Youth Forum emerged from that recognition, providing a mechanism to bring young health professionals together and connect them to a more deliberate pathway for development and industry engagement.
That experience matters because Nigeria needs to think about workforce development as a pipeline, not as a collection of disconnected training programmes. There are young people entering the sector who need to acquire technical skills for emerging manufacturing and supply-chain roles. There are also graduates who already possess qualifications but need practical experience and additional skills to become more employable. Both groups need clearer pathways into the industry.
Some programmes are already demonstrating what this can look like in practice, particularly in the health, pharmaceutical and nutrition commodities sectors. By beginning with employer demand, training young people for identified roles and incorporating placement into the programme from the outset, these initiatives offer a more useful model than generic skills training. The challenge now is to move from promising individual programmes to a workforce pipeline substantial enough to support the scale of Nigeria’s manufacturing ambition. Four priorities are particularly important.
First, geographic reach must be built into the pipeline from the beginning. Skills programmes have historically concentrated around Lagos and Abuja because that is where employers, training institutions and implementing organisations are most concentrated. But local manufacturing is a national ambition. There are early signs this is starting to shift: Empower Academy’s registered learners already span all 36 states, with Kaduna, Lagos, Nasarawa and Kano among the highest-enrolling. What has not kept pace is practical training and placement infrastructure – the labs, production lines and employer relationships that turn registration into a job. As new facilities emerge in other parts of the country, the workforce strategy must anticipate those needs rather than waiting until factories are operational before searching for talent.
Second, employment must become the measure of success. The number of people trained is an easy metric, but it tells us very little about whether a programme has solved the problem it set out to address. What matters is whether participants secure relevant employment, perform effectively and remain in work. Funding and programme performance should therefore increasingly be tied to placement and retention, rather than enrolment and completion alone.
Third, the workforce pipeline must be built to last. Nigeria’s manufacturing ambitions extend well beyond any individual donor programme or funding cycle. Workforce development therefore needs to become part of the long-term architecture of the healthcare value chain, with government, employers, training institutions and private sector organisations each playing defined and sustained roles. There are early signs that policy design, not training programmes alone, can help sustain a workforce: manufacturers benefiting from tax relief under the Executive Order on local pharmaceutical production have in some cases retained staff and reinvested savings into scaling up production rather than cutting back. A manufacturing sector being built for the long term cannot depend on short-term interventions to supply its workforce.
Fourth, practical training requires practical infrastructure. Young people cannot be expected to become production-ready by learning manufacturing processes entirely in classrooms. Sandbox facilities and simulation laboratories equipped with the kinds of machinery and instruments used in manufacturing and quality control can give trainees the opportunity to develop practical competence before entering live production environments. These should be treated as part of the infrastructure required to build a manufacturing workforce, not as an optional addition to classroom training.
This is also an area where donors and development partners can play a catalytic role by investing in the facilities, equipment and systems needed to make practical workforce development possible at scale.
Nigeria has an opportunity to build more than factories. It can build an industrial workforce with the technical capabilities to support a stronger pharmaceutical, medical manufacturing and nutrition commodities sector for years to come. But that opportunity will be lost if workforce development is treated as an afterthought.
The country’s health security strategy cannot stop at financing factories or importing production equipment. It must also invest in the people who will operate those facilities, maintain quality and turn productive capacity into reliable supply. Nigeria cannot build a resilient domestic health manufacturing sector without first building the workforce capable of making it work.
This article is a partnership between the Healthcare Federation of Nigeria (HFN) and BusinessDay to highlight policies and programmes to promote the rebuilding of Nigeria’s health sector. As a private sector-led coalition, HFN advocates for policies and partnerships to strengthen healthcare delivery. This partnership aims to spark meaningful discussions and drive transformative change in Nigeria’s health sector.