Healthcare executives, policymakers, investors, financial institutions, and medical professionals have called for an urgent coalition of investment and partnership to address what they described as a critical and widening gap between the growing demand for cancer treatment in Nigeria and the severely inadequate infrastructure currently available to meet it, agreeing that neither the public sector nor private enterprise could close the gap working in isolation.
The call emerged from a high-level Executive Business Networking Dinner in Lagos co-hosted by global healthcare technology company SHINVA Medical Solutions and Hospital Assist Nigeria, at which participants from across the healthcare investment and delivery ecosystem agreed that infrastructure deficits constituted an existential threat to oncology care in Nigeria and that the moment for decisive collaborative action had arrived.
Hospital Assist Nigeria Chief Executive Dr. Wale Alabi said the SHINVA-HAN collaboration had been designed specifically to go beyond medical equipment supply to include comprehensive training support, maintenance structures, and long-term healthcare infrastructure development, saying the long-term functionality of advanced technologies in Nigerian hospitals depended on the parallel development of local technical capacity rather than ongoing dependency on foreign expertise.
SHINVA Africa representative Kelvin Chen said Nigeria was one of Africa’s most strategically important healthcare markets and presented the company’s portfolio across oncology, radiotherapy, medical imaging, pharmaceutical equipment, sterilization systems, and broader healthcare infrastructure. He highlighted SHINVA’s Linear Accelerators and industrial sterilization technologies as particularly critical to strengthening Nigeria’s cancer treatment and infection prevention capacity.
Healthcare Federation of Nigeria President Njide Ndili said private sector engagement in healthcare delivery was growing but urged SHINVA and HAN to ensure that innovative technologies remained accessible, affordable, scalable, and sustainable in the Nigerian context, saying healthcare innovation that served only a narrow market segment would not meaningfully improve population health outcomes.
