Kwara State has delivered Vitamin A supplements to 1.6 million children and rolled out nutritional support to more than half a million expectant mothers within the current year, according to the Executive Secretary of the Kwara State Primary Health Care Development Agency, Professor Nusirat Elelu. Speaking on the programme's impact, Elelu said the agency's Vitamin A drive is designed to cut the incidence of diarrhoea and measles among under-fives. The interventions also cover iron and folate distribution, deworming tablets and nutrition counselling for pregnant women across the 16 local government areas. Officials credit the scale of the coverage to a partnership between the state government, the Federal Ministry of Health and donor agencies that supplied the micronutrients. Elelu added that community health extension workers moved from house to house in rural wards to reach children who rarely appear at fixed health posts. Records from the agency show that the first round of the 2025 campaign ended in March, while a second phase is planned for August before the rains peak.

💡 NaijaBuzz Take

Kwara's 1.6 million children figure is startling: it equals roughly every single under-five in the state queueing for a Vitamin A shot, yet the same government still struggles to keep basic primary-health centres open beyond Thursday. Professor Elelu's agency is essentially running a fire-brigade nutrition programme while the underlying clinics lack power, water or even a nurse on duty most days.

The arithmetic is revealing. Vitamin A costs a few naira per capsule and can be handed out in market squares, so it fits neatly into the "quick-impact" column of the state's scorecard. Fixing the larger primary-care system—where Kwara's 2024 budget allocated less than five per cent to capital expenditure in rural facilities—would gulp billions and yield no instant headlines. Expectant mothers who received iron tablets today still have to travel kilometres for antenatal scans tomorrow because the ultrasound machine is either broken or never arrived.

For the average Kwara family, the takeaway is double-edged: your toddler is less likely to go blind from measles complications, but if fever strikes next week you will still dash to a patent-medicine vendor for drugs that may be fake. The programme saves lives, yet it also quietly shifts responsibility for comprehensive care to households that can least afford it.

This pattern repeats across Nigeria's states: mass supplementation wins applause, the invisible infrastructure rot continues, and next year another statistic of "children reached" will be rolled out to mask how thin the health system has become.

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