The federal government has commissioned the expanded Abuja Premier Medical Warehouse near the Federal Medical Centre in the FCT, a facility equipped with 2,000 cold chain refrigerators designed to ensure the proper storage of temperature-sensitive medicines and vaccines, as part of a national health supply chain strengthening effort that has included similar warehouse expansions across 21 states.
Health Minister Professor Ali Pate, represented by Permanent Secretary Daju Kachallom, described the facility as a critical national health logistics asset and said the project went beyond physical infrastructure to encompass the technology, systems, and human capacity needed to ensure commodities reached health facilities in the condition required for them to be effective.
The project was built with Global Fund support, whose Executive Director Peter Sands urged Nigeria to deploy the facility purposefully to produce measurable improvements in health outcomes. WHO Country Representative Dr. Pavel Ursu described the warehouse as a foundational building block for the health system as a whole rather than an asset serving specific disease programmes. UNICEF Country Representative Wafaa Saeed Abdelatef said the facility would strengthen maternal health supply chains and improve equitable access to medicines and vaccines nationwide.
The minister appealed to the Global Fund to expand its warehouse investment support to additional states, saying the government was committed to ensuring that every health facility across the country could access well-stored, high-quality medical commodities.
