Expanding Faith Based Healthcare in Nigeria Through The America First Global Health Strategy.

December 2025: On December 20th, the United States Department of State signed a 05 years bilateral health Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Federal Republic of Nigeria to strengthen Nigeria’s health system, with a strong emphasis on promoting Christian faith-based health care providers.

Under this MOU, the Department of State, working with Congress, intends to commit nearly $2.1 billion to expand essential preventative and curative services for HIV, TB, malaria, maternal and child health and polio.  Additionally, Nigeria will increase its domestic health expenditures by nearly $3 billion during the term of the MOU, the largest co-investment any country has made to date under the America First Global Health Strategy.

Before delving into the details of the MOU with Nigeria, an insight of the America’s First Global Health Strategy needs to be reiterated.

America First Global Health Strategy – Bilateral Agreements on Global Health Cooperation:

As outlined in the America First Global Health Strategy, the United States will sign multi-year Bilateral Agreements on Global Health Cooperation with dozens of countries receiving U.S. health assistance in the coming weeks. These landmark agreements will advance a comprehensive and shared vision directly between the United States and recipient country governments for continued future cooperation on global health issues. The agreements will also maximise the impact of our global health assistance and strengthen our bilateral relationships while simultaneously saving millions of lives, stopping the spread of diseases globally, and helping countries move toward more resilient and durable health systems.

These bilateral global health agreements will continue to build on decades of global health investment by fully transitioning U.S. technical assistance and other key functions, including financial responsibility, to countries currently receiving U.S. health assistance.

A key component of each bilateral agreement will be staying committed to the ambitious goals that we have set over the past decades for combatting the spread of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and polio, while prioritising maternal and child health, disease surveillance, and infectious disease outbreak preparedness. Our guiding principles in these agreements will include streamlining performance monitoring, reducing non-frontline investment by integrating U.S., programming within a country’s broader health system, mobilising the private sector and faith-based organisations, and requiring increased co-investment from receipt countries for healthcare workers and commodities.

Each agreement will contain important and innovative provisions that facilitate long-term sustainability such as:

Commodities: The procurement of commodities will be transitioned from the U.S. government to partner governments gradually over the established period of the agreement. The United States has committed to covering 100 percent of frontline healthcare workers and commodities for the next fiscal year and will work with countries to co-invest in these efforts over time.

Frontline Health Workers: Frontline health workers currently funded by the U.S. government will be mapped to the cadres of health workers that can be employed by partner governments, and those cadres of health workers will be transitioned to the partner government payroll over a multi-year period as jointly agreed to.

Data Systems: Funding will support the scale up of partner governments’ health data systems to ensure key programmatic data for HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, polio, and disease outbreaks can be tracked at scale long-term.

Co-Investment: Partner governments will increase their domestic health expenditures over the agreement period, a critical step in ensuring partner governments have the resources they need to sustain their health response long-term without support from the U.S. government.

Performance Incentives and Transition Assistance: U.S. government financial support will be linked to countries’ ability to meet or exceed key health metrics with financial incentives for countries who exceed those metrics.

Since 2001, the United States has invested more than $204 billion to bolster other governments’ health sectors, supporting programs that have saved lives, strengthened health systems, and improved global health cooperation. Through these new bilateral health cooperation agreements, we preserve what works in our health foreign assistance programs while rapidly fixing what is broken. This is another example of the Trump Administration’s America First Global Health Strategy ensuring America is safer, stronger, and more prosperous.

Now, the MOU with Nigeria which was negotiated in connection with reforms the Nigerian government has made to prioritise protecting Christian populations from violence and includes significant dedicated funding to support Christian health care facilities with a focus on expanding access to integrated HIV, TB, malaria, and maternal and child health services.

Nigeria’s 900 faith-based clinics and hospitals currently serve more than 30% of Nigerians, and investments in these facilities are uniquely positioned to complement efforts in public run facilities and strengthen Nigeria’s overall health infrastructure. As with all foreign assistance, the President and Secretary of State retain the right to pause or terminate any programs which do not align with the national interest, and the Trump Administration expects Nigeria to continue to make progress ensuring that it combats extremist religious violence against vulnerable Christian populations.

Team Maverick.