**Our nation’s dedicated group of traditional leaders do not always get the credit they deserve for preserving the best of our history, of our traditions, and of who we are today.

Without fanfare, our traditional leaders have met quarterly for 16 consecutive years with health sector officials in strengthening the nation’s primary healthcare system, mobilizing grassroots support for routine immunization, and supporting social stability to ensure that our reforms are implemented and sustained.

Under the remarkable leadership of H.E. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR, we have worked assiduously alongside the Association of Local Governments of Nigeria (ALGON), State Health Commissioners’ Forum, and the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) to retrain 60,000 frontline health workers, improve reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health, while scaling up financing for health infrastructure and leveraging innovation for further reform as we collectively achieve the objectives of H.E. President Bola Tinubu’s Nigeria Health Sector Renewal Investment Initiative (NHSRII).

I have recently visited several State Governors across Northern Nigeria and we have welcomed dozens of our royal fathers in recent days to the Federal Capital Territory to assess progress on the ground.

Without robust collaboration with our royal fathers and executive administrators, these objectives would be difficult to achieve and we realize that Nigeria’s health reforms have to be domesticated within our own cultural context, even as we advance progressive ideas for health sector now and in the future.

I am delighted to share further insight into the criticality and substance of these collaborative efforts with you in this briefing from my desk.*Prof. Muhammad Ali Pate*