It is my pleasure to congratulate Aero Contractors on 67 years of flight operations @FlyAeroOfficial. Founded in 1959, Aero stands today as Nigeria’s oldest operating airline, having connected our cities for generations, supported the offshore energy sector through its helicopter services, and trained successive cohorts of Nigerian pilots, engineers and aviation professionals through its maintenance and training organisations.

Safe and reliable air connectivity shapes so much of national life, from families reuniting and businesses growing to health workers, medical supplies and patients reaching the care they need across a country as vast as ours. I extend my very best wishes to the management, crew and staff of Aero as the airline continues to serve Nigerians with excellence for many years to come.

#AeroAt67
#NigerianAviation ...

In the lead up to tomorrow’s World Mental Health Day, I had the honour of co-convening a High-Level Roundtable on Suicide Decriminalisation and Crisis Support in Nigeria as Global Honorary Patron of LifeLine International, alongside His Excellency Svein Bæra, Ambassador of the Kingdom of Norway, who graciously welcomed us to his residence in Abuja @NorwayInNigeria, and His Excellency Mr David Port, Acting High Commissioner of Australia @AusHCAbuja.

We were honoured to be joined by Distinguished Senator Dr Ibrahim Yahaya Oloriegbe, and by representatives of the Deputy Speaker, Rt. Hon. Benjamin Kalu; the Attorney-General of the Federation, Prince Lateef Fagbemi, SAN; the Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Prof. Muhammad Ali Pate; and Distinguished Senator Asuquo Ekpenyong.

The Federal Executive Council’s approval, under the leadership of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR, of a proposed amendment to the National Mental Health Act marks a considered and compassionate step for our nation, recognising that a person who attempts to take their own life is in acute distress and deserves care, protection and support. The @WHO estimates that more than 7,000 Nigerians die by suicide each year, with around 300,000 attempts, and the experience of Ghana and Malaysia, which reformed their laws in 2023, shows that help-seeking rises when the law meets people with care.

Reform opens the door, and what lies beyond it must be ready to receive people. We discussed toll-free crisis lines that answer at every hour, trained community responders, and clear pathways from first contact to treatment, guided by this year’s theme, Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change.

As the proposal proceeds to the National Assembly, LifeLine International, its Members in Nigeria and @WellbeingAfrica stand ready to support @FMOH_Nigeria and our legislators with technical expertise and comparative insight.

My sincere thanks to the Royal Norwegian Embassy and the Australian High Commission for their partnership and hospitality, and to every clinician, advocate and partner who joined us.

#WorldMentalHealthDay
#WellbeingForAll
#FrontlineFriday ...

I was delighted to be in Lagos yesterday for the US-Nigeria Strategic Dialogue, convened by The @HeritageFoundation in partnership with the American Business Council Nigeria @ABCouncil_NG at The Wheatbaker, Ikoyi, alongside senior American and Nigerian policymakers, investors and partners.

As the United States celebrates 250 years of independence, the Dialogue advanced a proposition I wholeheartedly welcome, that Nigeria’s importance will increasingly be measured by what Nigeria possesses that the world will need. Our energy and critical minerals, our abundant farmland and our strategic Atlantic location rightly anchored the day’s deliberations, and together they speak to a nation of extraordinary promise.

To those assets, I would add one more, the health and wellbeing of the Nigerian people, upon which every ambition in energy, trade, infrastructure and security ultimately depends. Nigeria accounted for nearly three in every ten maternal deaths recorded worldwide in 2023. A growing workforce becomes a strategic advantage when its mothers survive childbirth, its newborns thrive and its children are well nourished in the first thousand days of life.

The five-year US-Nigeria health memorandum of understanding, which joins some $2.1 billion in American support with close to $3 billion in new Nigerian health spending, already shows what shared commitment and shared responsibility can deliver. The same principle can guide American and Nigerian enterprise as it invests in reliable power for health facilities, resilient supply chains for essential medicines, and the cold chains that carry them to the communities that need them most.

As the Dialogue moves from discussion to delivery, I respectfully encourage that the health and wellbeing of Nigerian women, children and families be counted among the priority areas of its Statement of Principles. It is a cause to which the @WellbeingAfrica Foundation has long been devoted, and one we will gladly carry into the partnerships ahead.

My sincere thanks to Dr James Jay Carafano, Ms Margaret Olele and Mr Ayo Otuyalo for a timely and important convening.

#USNigeria
#WellbeingForAll ...

This week, as the global community observes the second World Postpartum Haemorrhage Day, we mark one year since @WHO, @FIGO_HQ and @World_Midwives launched their consolidated guidelines on postpartum haemorrhage at the FIGO 2025 World Congress in Cape Town, the gathering at which 5 October was declared a global day of awareness, action and accountability, and where our delegation from @WellbeingAfrica pledged to end PPH by championing equitable care and the midwives who stand beside every woman at birth.

The 2026 Lancet Series from @TheLancetGroup has lent that moment renewed urgency, estimating that PPH affects 27 million women each year and claims nearly 43,000 lives, one woman every twelve minutes, while finding that visual estimation misses around half of all cases and that calibrated drapes paired with an immediate treatment bundle can reduce progression to life-threatening haemorrhage by up to 60 per cent.

This evidence carries forward a journey the @WellbeingAfrica Foundation has long travelled, from our Millennium Development Goal era advocacy alongside the DFID-funded PATHS2 programme for anti-shock garments and calibrated drapes in Nigeria @ForeignAndDevelopmentOffice, to championing the @LSHTM WOMAN trial, which showed that tranexamic acid given within three hours of bleeding onset reduces deaths from bleeding by nearly a third, and heat-stable carbetocin from @FerringPharmaceuticals, which requires no cold chain. The new implementation guide from the World Health Organization with its partners, @Jhpiego and @UNFPA, now draws these advances together at the bedside.

As we look towards 2030, I call upon health ministries, partners and donors to invest at scale in calibrated drapes, quality-assured medicines and midwifery training, and to count, audit and account for every woman lost to bleeding after birth, so that no mother dies because help arrived too late.

#WorldPPHDay
#EndPPH
#WellbeingForAll ...

It was a particular joy, on my return to Lagos on Saturday morning, to join @bukolasaraki in gracing the beautiful traditional marriage of my beloved goddaughter, Temitope, and her husband, Oghenemaro Malaka, and to share in the happiness of their wonderful families, Mr and Mrs Jide and Shola Coker and Mr and Mrs Pius and Ajirioghene Malaka.

Temitope and her twin sister, Temitayo, have held a very special place in my heart over the years as their godmother, and it was deeply touching to witness this beautiful new chapter in Temitope’s life.

To my dear Jide and Shola, and to the entire Coker and Malaka families, my heartfelt congratulations on this joyous union, beautifully bringing together the rich traditional cultures of Lagos, Edo and Delta, and graciously chaired by our dear friend and brother, Alhaji Abdulsamad Rabiu.

Dear Temi and Maro, may your marriage be blessed with enduring love, friendship, wisdom and mutual respect. May God guide your steps together, prosper your home, and grant you many happy years of companionship, joy and fulfilment.

With all my love and prayers for a beautiful life together. ❤️

#TemitopeAndOghenemaro #TeMaroMucho26 #TheCokerFamily #TheMalakaFamily #BlessedUnion ...

It was a joy to travel to Avignon with my dear husband @BukolaSaraki for the wedding of Pekun Bakare and Fafa Segbefia, a celebration set amid the golden light of Provence.

We were delighted to share in such a beautiful occasion with the Bakare and Segbefia families, and to stand once more alongside our dear friends Joke and Muyiwa Bakare as they welcome Fafa into their family. Provence offered every bit of its famed joie de vivre, and the newlyweds could not have chosen a more fitting setting to begin their life together.

Félicitations, Pekun and Fafa. May your marriage be blessed with love, peace and every happiness, à la vie, à l’amour. ...

Today marks the beginning of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and this year`s World Health Organization theme, Every Story is Unique, Every Journey Matters, invites us to remember that behind every diagnosis stands a woman, a family and a community, each meeting this disease with different challenges, different networks of support and very different access to care.

Breast cancer remains the most common cancer among women worldwide, and according to the @WHO, an estimated 2.4 million women were diagnosed and 694,000 women lost their lives to the disease in 2024. The journey after diagnosis is shaped profoundly by geography, with around 41% of women in low-income countries expected to survive five years after diagnosis, compared with 87% in high-income countries, while approximately 70% of breast cancer deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries.

As a Member of the Global Breast Cancer Care Council, convened by @AstraZeneca, I am grateful to contribute to the Breast Cancer Care Quality Index #BCCQI, which helps countries measure and strengthen the quality of care across the full breast cancer pathway. Alongside this, @WellbeingAfrica works at the community and primary care end of that pathway, supporting patient navigation so that women across Nigeria are guided from awareness and first symptoms through to timely referral, diagnosis, treatment and the support they need along the way.

This October, I join the WHO in calling on health systems and partners everywhere to advance the targets of the Global Breast Cancer Initiative, ensuring that 60% of invasive breast cancers are diagnosed at stage I or II, that diagnosis follows within 60 days of first presentation, and that 80% of those diagnosed receive complete treatment, so that where a woman lives need never determine whether she survives.

#BCAM2026
#BreastCancerAwarenessMonth
#WellbeingForAll ...

As High-Level Week at the 81st Session of the @UnitedNations General Assembly continued in New York, the delegation of the H.E. Toyin Saraki Global Policy and Philanthropy Office and the @WellbeingAfrica Foundation was represented on the panel Trade, Tariffs, Manufacturing and Investment in Personalised Medicine by my Director of Global Health Policy, Advocacy and Communications, Zelia Bukhari, at MFN, Trade and Tariffs, The Future of Personalised Medicine, chaired by Dr Denis Horgan, Secretary General of the International Alliance for Personalised Medicine.

Zelia joined a panel moderated by Dr Vivek Subbiah of the Stanford Cancer Institute, with Prashant Yadav of the Council on Foreign Relations, Dr Mitchell Elkind of the American Heart Association, Josep Figueras of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies and Dr Oscar Arrieta Rodríguez of the Instituto Nacional de Cancerología in Mexico, following a keynote earlier in the afternoon on when trade policy becomes health policy, in which Dr John Longshore of @AstraZeneca joined Professor Michael Makanga of EDCTP and colleagues from Brazil and the United States.

Personalised medicine travels a long pathway, from research to clinical trial, diagnostic test, treatment and follow-up, and a tariff, a localisation rule or a pricing decision taken in one market can interrupt it in every other. A woman in Lagos or Ilorin cannot benefit from a targeted therapy her hospital cannot obtain, nor from a biomarker test her laboratory cannot run, which is why my office highlighted that access depends equally upon the pathologists, the laboratories, the workforce and the data systems that make precision possible.

The conference concluded with the New York Principles on MFN, Trade and Personalised Medicine, calling for a patient-access test on all major pricing, tariff and localisation measures, and for the assessment of their international spillovers upon smaller and lower-income markets. Our thanks to Dr Horgan for the invitation.

#UNGA81
#PersonalisedMedicine
#WellbeingForAll ...

As my Global Office and @WellbeingAfrica Foundation delegation continued its #UNGA81 engagements, my office joined the Annual Summit of the Global Alliance for Women’s Health, convened by the @WorldEconomicForum alongside the Forum’s Sustainable Development Impact Meetings, where I am glad to serve within the Champions Community as a WEF Champion of the Global Alliance for Women’s Health.

The session on the State of Women’s Health brought together Dr Muyi Aina of Nigeria’s National Primary Health Care Development Agency @NPHCDA, Claire Thwaites of @ThisIsReckitt, Ishaan Tewarie of EQT Life Sciences and Sanjana Bhardwaj of the @GatesFoundation.

Women spend a quarter more of their lives in poor health than men, and the Alliance was founded on the finding that closing that gap could add at least one trillion dollars to the global economy each year by 2040, the equivalent of 137 million women in full-time employment. Having joined this Alliance at its inception, it is a satisfaction to see the evidence maturing into investment, policy and care delivery.

Of particular significance for Nigeria was the Private-Sector Compact announced in support of the Maternal Mortality Reduction Innovation Initiative, aligning private and philanthropic capability behind workforce, supply chain, emergency transportation and financial protection in the local government areas where maternal mortality is highest, with government able to mobilise and track what each partner brings. Through #MamaCare360 and the midwives and nurses of my @WellbeingAfrica Foundation, we have long held that coordination of this kind is what turns a commitment into care a woman actually receives.

I invite investors, industry and governments to carry this next phase into delivery, financing women’s health across the life course as the growth strategy the evidence has shown it to be.

#WomensHealth
#MAMII
#WellbeingForAll ...

Happy 75th birthday to Alhaja Lateefat Yoyinsola Awero Makanjuola, a gracious Lagos matriarch, educationist and author who has shaped countless young lives.

Aunty Yoyin’s luxuriously intimate celebration, with guests wearing white, the colour she fittingly chose, bore all the elegance, serenity and dignity for which she is so widely admired.

It was a privilege to share in this special occasion. May the seasons ahead bring her continued good health, happiness and abundant blessings.

#HappyBirthday ...

It was a very special joy to be in the Eternal City of Rome a few days ago, celebrating my dear friend, Yvonne Ike Fasinro @yvonne_fasinro, as she marked her 60th birthday.

From the splendour of Il Teatro delle Meraviglie at Palazzo Rondinini, to our beautiful celebratory Mass at the Basilica di San Pietro in Vaticano, and the gracious gatherings that followed, it was a truly memorable celebration of a remarkable milestone.

Yvonne, your grace, warmth, elegance and enduring friendship are gifts to all who have the privilege of knowing you. May this new decade bring you abundant blessings, good health, joy, purpose and many more beautiful chapters.

Happy 60th Birthday, dear Yvonne. May your eternal spring continue to bloom! 🥂✨

#YvonneIke60 #HappyBirthdayYvonne #EternalSpring #Rome #GratefulForHisGrace ...

It was truly a special joy to join @bukolasaraki in celebrating my dear friend and brother, Aigboje, and his exceedingly amiable wife and life partner, Ofovwe, as the celebrations marking his 60th birthday commenced in Lagos this week.

Our friendship stretches back to our primary school days at St Saviour’s, making this milestone not only a celebration of six remarkable decades, but also of a friendship that has endured and flourished through the years.

I have watched with admiration as Aigboje has built an exceptional corporate career, but perhaps even more meaningful has been the way he has chosen to dedicate his influence, experience and resources to the public good.

As Founder @WellbeingAfrica Foundation, I particularly recognise Aig’s leadership of @gbchealth the Global Business Coalition for Health and the Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria @pshan_alliance, the important work at the @AigImoukhuedeFoundation in strengthening civil service capacity, and his service through The @KingsTrustInternational
and the Global Citizen Nigeria @glblctzn Board. His commitment to building stronger institutions, advancing health and creating opportunities for others has been deeply significant.

Aigboje, may this new decade bring you abundant grace, good health, fulfilment and many more opportunities to serve and inspire. Ofovwe, thank you for the love, partnership and grace with which you continue to walk this journey beside him.

Happy 60th Birthday, dear Aigboje. Here’s to six decades of friendship, achievement, service and purpose, and to the many more chapters still to come.

With great respect and warmest wishes. 🥂✨

#HappyBirthday
#GratefulForHisGrace ...

As the work of #UNGA81 High-Level Week continues in New York, the @WellbeingAfrica Foundation was glad to be present at the Devex Impact House for Everyday Impact: Scaling Postpartum Haemorrhage Prevention and Treatment Innovations, convened in partnership with MSD for Mothers.

Postpartum haemorrhage remains among the foremost causes of maternal death across the world, and it remains a cause that we have long known how to prevent and to treat, which is what makes each loss so difficult to accept. Moderated by Ms Rumbi Chakamba of Devex, the discussion brought together Dr Tomi Coker of the Ogun State Ministry of Health @ogsghealth, Dr Uchenna Igbokwe of the Solina Centre for International Development and Research @SCIDaR_, Dr Bashir Issak of the Ministry of Health of Kenya, and colleagues from @Jhpiego and LifeNet International, on what is required to carry proven innovation out of the pilot and into the routine practice of a health system, where it belongs.

This is the work at the core of #WBFA’s mission, through the training of midwives, nurses, and frontline health workers, and through the antenatal and postnatal education that our midwives deliver to mothers in their thousands across Nigeria under #MamaCare360. Where the science has been settled for some time, it is the delivery that must now command our attention, so that care for women, children and adolescents is within reach across the life course, and I invite our partners across government, industry and philanthropy to hold that ambition alongside us.

#MaternalHealth
#PostpartumHaemorrhage
WellbeingForAll ...