Every year, stakeholders across Nigeria’s health sector pour enormous effort into designing solutions for the challenges facing emergency medical care. New systems are built, programmes are funded, and policies are signed. But too often, the people those interventions were designed to reach never hear about them, and so the gap between what exists and what is actually used remains stubbornly wide.
In April 2026, NEMSAS, the National Emergency Medical Services and Ambulance System, set out to directly tackle that gap by convening a two-day media training workshop in Abuja, with SCIDaR, Solina Centre for International Development and Research, providing technical support for delivery. The workshop brought together journalists from national print, broadcast, and digital outlets alongside civil society organisations and health sector stakeholders, to build a media cell capable of reporting Nigeria’s emergency health reform with the depth and consistency it deserves.
What was most striking about the two days was how quickly the penny dropped for participants. Many came in thinking of NEMSAS as a narrow, niche health programme. By the end of Day 1, the picture had expanded considerably. They were working through how NEMSAS connects to MAMII, the Maternal Mortality Reduction Innovation Initiative, to SWAp, the Sector-Wide Approach, to NHSRII, the Nigerian Health Sector Renewal Investment Initiative, one of Nigeria’s most ambitious health reform framework, and beginning to understand that every story about emergency response is also a story about governance, financing, and accountability at the highest levels of the health system.
Dr. Lawal Bakare of the SWAp Coordination Office captured it well when he told the room: "There is no reform where the institution is not visible." That sentence stayed with all present, because it emphases the importance of investing in strategic communication, the sustained, deliberate work of making complex health systems legible to the public, building the kind of trust that drives uptake, and creating the accountability pressure that keeps reform on track. NEMSAS has facilitated emergency transport for over 43,000 pregnant women and newborns across 132 local government areas, by deploying the SaveMama digital platform in five pilot states, and established a footprint across 33 states.. But impact that is not communicated is impact that does not compound, it does not build public trust, does not drive uptake, and does not generate the accountability pressure that sustains reform.
The sessions on data verification and misinformation were particularly lively. Participants worked through real cases, viral claims about emergency services, health information circulating on social media without context or source, and practised the discipline of checking before publishing. In a media environment where speed often wins over accuracy, building that instinct deliberately matters. To wrap up the training, e participants collaboratively developed a structured media engagement framework for ongoing collaboration with NEMSAS. This framework, we hope, signals the beginning of a partnership that just might turn the wheels on how emergency medical services are being reported in Nigeria to enable ongoing reforms.
Within hours of closing, journalists began filing stories in DistinctNews, Nigerian Tribune, Daily Independent, Voice of Nigeria, NAN, Radio Nigeria, Time Nigeria, and MediaAge. These stories were about telecom gaps undermining emergency response, about the paramedic shortage, about what it actually takes to get a pregnant woman to safety in rural Nigeria. Stories that situate the problem, interrogate the system, and invite the reader to expect more from the people responsible for fixing it.
