Nigerian clinical pharmacy and health-outcomes researcher Dr. Abdulmuminu Isah has called for stronger, locally generated evidence to guide health spending decisions in Nigeria, presenting a new protocol designed to anchor national cost-effectiveness assessments in Nigerian population preferences rather than imported assumptions.

Isah delivered the presentation at the 7th International Scientific Conference of the African Health Economics and Policy Association (AfHEA) in Kigali, Rwanda, held from March 10 to 14, 2025, a continental forum that convenes researchers, policymakers, and practitioners shaping how African countries evaluate health programmes, medicines, and service delivery reforms.

At the centre of Isah’s presentation was a protocol titled “A context-specific protocol for developing a quality-adjusted life year value set for Nigerian adult population,” co-authored with Chinelo Esther Obi, Iheomimichineke Ojiakor, Chibueze Anosike, Onochie Chigozie Eze, Kingsley Ude, and Obinna Emmanuel Onwujekwe. Isah explained that Nigeria’s health system increasingly requires credible tools to compare the value delivered by different interventions—whether in infectious-disease control, chronic disease care, preventive services, or broader system strengthening.

Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are widely used in health technology assessment to combine length of life and quality of life into a single measure, enabling decision-makers to compare interventions on a common scale. But Isah noted a persistent challenge: without a Nigeria-specific value set, many evaluations risk depending on value weights from other countries that may not reflect how Nigerians perceive health states, disability, pain, mental wellbeing, or functional limitations. He argued that a national value set strengthens fairness, transparency, and credibility when agencies or payers must decide what to fund, scale, or prioritise.

The protocol Isah presented outlines a pathway for developing a Nigeria-specific adult value set using internationally recognized valuation approaches commonly applied to health-related quality-of-life instruments. In practical terms, the protocol aims to create a reliable reference that Nigerian researchers and decision-makers can apply across evaluations, so that comparisons between interventions are not only methodologically sound but also reflect Nigerian societal preferences. He emphasized that economic evidence becomes most useful when it is context-aware: grounded in local preferences, measured with robust methods, and presented in a way that supports real-world policy decisions.

Dr. Isah’s research background sits at the intersection of clinical pharmacy, infectious-disease therapeutics, and health-outcomes research, a blend that enables him to translate patient experience and clinical realities into decision frameworks that policymakers can use. By presenting a protocol focused on Nigeria’s adult population, Isah and colleagues signaled what many delegates described as a key direction for health systems on the continent: building local measurement foundations to make priority-setting more credible, transparent, and responsive to the population’s health needs.