No fewer than 1.7 million women have accessed IntegratE’s family planning project in Nigeria, just as over 1.18 million children under five benefitted from its primary healthcare services through the Community Pharmacists (CPs) and Patent and Proprietary Medicine Vendors (PPMVs), the group has said.

Data on the project’s national impact since its launch in 2017 to its close in 2026 showed that 1,756,170 women accessed family planning services, including 399,766 new acceptors, while 117,775 unintended pregnancies were estimated to have been averted in the process, and 408,943 couple-years of protection were generated.

The figures were released yesterday at the IntegratE Project Dissemination Meeting in Lagos by the Society for Family Health (SFH), partnering with the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, Pharmacy Council of Nigeria (PCN), Lagos State Ministry of Health, Lagos State Primary Healthcare Board, and the Gates Foundation.

The project, which piloted a three-tier accreditation system in Lagos and Kaduna to expand the role of CPs and PPMVs, also trained 863 CPs and 4,961 PPMVs to provide family planning and primary healthcare services across 11 states.

According to the data, commodities delivered nationally included over 4.6 million condoms, 923,558 cycles of oral pills, 321,701 injectables and 80,679 implants.

Beyond family planning, the trained providers also attended to over 1.18 million children under five, tested over 923,000 people for malaria and treated 682,601 confirmed malaria cases.

Among others, the providers also treated 340,142 cases of diarrhoea and 137,703 cases of pneumonia, while identifying 10,898 presumptive tuberculosis cases, with 1,320 cases confirmed and placed on treatment.

Speaking at the project close-out, the Director and Head of Reproductive Health Division, Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, Dr Samuel Oyeniyi, said the project has demonstrated that CPs and PPMVs could be effectively integrated into the delivery of quality family planning and primary healthcare services.

For the Director of Family Health at the Gates Foundation in Nigeria, Rodio Diallo, sustainability was built into the project’s grant from the outset, with CPs and PPMVs now embedded in national policy.

She called on the government to budget for scaling up training, and on other donors to invest in empowering community-level providers.

Also, the Group Director of SFH’s Donor Funded Portfolio, Emeka Okafor, who represented SFH Group Managing Director, said that, with appropriate training for provider qualification, plus constant supervision and regulatory support, CPs and PPMVs could safely and effectively expand family planning services.

In his keynote address, the PCN Registrar, Ibrahim Ahmed, noted that since many Nigerians live far from public health facilities, the proximity of PPMVs and CPs provides an important lever in the drive toward universal health coverage.