Through a new $5 million award from the US Agency for International Development, IntraHealth International will help build a stronger, more equitably distributed health workforce to address HIV in Nigeria.

The two-year associate award—HIV/AIDS Delivery through Human Resources for Health Systems in Nigeria— builds on the many achievements of the global, IntraHealth-led CapacityPlus project.

About 3.2 million people live with HIV in Nigeria, or 3.4% of adults. AIDS has left roughly 1.6 million of the country’s children orphaned.

IntraHealth will build the capacity of our partners to strengthen Nigeria's existing health workforce, attract and retain more skilled workers, and ensure that they’re available and qualified to provide high-quality, integrated HIV services at some of the busiest facilities in USAID/Nigeria’s four focus states: Akwa Ibom, Cross River, Lagos, and Rivers.

This new project will focus on building the capacity necessary to implement a suite of comprehensive human resources for health interventions that will allow Nigeria to assess and strengthen its health workforce capacity at the national, state, and local government area levels, and to develop evidence-based interventions that will help the country achieve an AIDS-free generation.

Together, IntraHealth and our partners will use state- and site-level data on human resources for health and HIV to:

• Implement data-driven solutions that consider national and international HIV guidelines.
• Help pilot and evaluate new task-shifting policies.
• Institute global best practices in health workforce development and management.
• Apply a robust performance-monitoring plan to continually track and evaluate project performance.

IntraHealth will leverage partnerships to institutionalize the most effective systems around human resources for health and ensure national stakeholders establish country ownership of these systems by the project’s end.

Through the CapacityPlus project, IntraHealth provided scholarships for over 2,000 community health extension worker and midwifery students, assessed 39 HIV training programs, and helped roll out iHRIS Train, iHRIS Qualify, and iHRIS Manage—IntraHealth-designed information systems that Nigeria now uses to manage and track its health workforce.

IntraHealth’s HIV/AIDS Delivery through Human Resources for Health Systems in Nigeria is funded by the US Agency for International Development.