Nigeria now carries the highest cancer burden in Africa. Cancer deaths in this country already exceed deaths from tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV combined. For breast cancer alone, 79 per cent of Nigerian women present with locally advanced or metastatic disease, and only 28 percent survive five years. Compare that to settings where early detection is routine, and five-year survival climbs above 85 percent. The medicines are not meaningfully different. The timing is.
That gap, the one between what we die from and what we could have survived, is the clearest, most actionable public health failure we have. And it is almost entirely a screening problem.
The shape of a preventable death
Non-communicable diseases now account for 29 percent of all deaths in Nigeria, roughly 447,800 lives every year. The Ministry of Health estimates that most of these deaths occur between the ages of 30 and 70. These are not elderly Nigerians dying of old age. These are breadwinners, mothers, teachers, pharmacists, people who should have had another two or three decades.
The quiet killers are familiar: hypertension, diabetes, breast cancer, cervical cancer, prostate cancer, chronic kidney disease, sickle cell complications, hepatitis-driven liver cancer. Every one of them is screen-able. Most are treatable when caught early. Almost all become unaffordable, unbearable, or un-survivable when caught late.
The cervical cancer data makes the point painfully. Over half of Nigerian women diagnosed with cervical cancer present at stages III or IV. The vaccine exists. The screening test costs less than a tank of fuel. The disease, caught early, is largely curable. Yet it kills about 8,000 Nigerian women every year, most of them in their prime.
This is not a treatment failure. It is a detection failure.
The economics of catching it early
There is a reason insurers in mature health systems pay for screening without blinking. A mammogram costs a fraction of chemotherapy. An HbA1c test costs a fraction of a diabetic foot amputation. A blood pressure reading costs almost nothing compared to a stroke rehabilitation bill.
In Nigeria, where roughly 70 per cent of healthcare is paid out of pocket, the economics are even more stark. A family that could have absorbed a N15,000 screening cost twelve months earlier will often face a N15 million treatment bill, sell property, drain pensions, and still bury the patient. The financial violence of late diagnosis is one of the most under-discussed drivers of poverty in this country.
If we are serious about universal health coverage, we cannot build it on a treatment-first model. The arithmetic does not work. The only affordable health system is one that invests heavily in the cheap, boring, upstream interventions that stop expensive illness from happening in the first place.
Where pharmacists come in
Here is the uncomfortable truth for our profession: pharmacies are the most accessible health touchpoint in Nigeria, and we have systematically underused that position.
The average Nigerian visits a pharmacy five to seven times more often than they visit a doctor. Every one of those visits is a missed screening opportunity. A pharmacist checking blood pressure during a routine antimalarial purchase has prevented more strokes than most of us will ever know. A pharmacist flagging a persistent cough, an unexplained weight loss, a change in bowel habits, or an abnormal lump has pulled patients back from timelines they did not know they were on.
Community pharmacy must evolve from a dispensing counter into a frontline detection network. That means normalising blood pressure, blood sugar, BMI, and waist circumference checks for every adult who walks in. It means training staff to recognise red flags and refer. It means partnering with laboratories, hospitals, and digital health platforms so a flagged patient actually completes the diagnostic journey rather than disappearing after the referral.
At HubPharm Africa, early detection is embedded into our chronic condition infrastructure. Our 10 clinical programmes, from Heart Health Access to Cancer Access to Diabetes and Endocrinology Access, are designed around the premise that no patient should die from a disease we could have caught. Our 3rd Annual Free Health Screening this year will put thousands of Nigerians through a package of checks they would otherwise have skipped. It is one of the most impactful things we do, and it costs less than many of our marketing line items.
Sesan Kareem is the founder and president of HubPharm Africa, a licensed pharmacy and chronic condition management platform. Hubpharm is recognised as ECOWAS startup of the year 2026 for its innovation in chronic care management.
