Nigerian Mental Health Policy Commitment Tracker
What gets measured gets managed.
— Peter Drucker, widely regarded as the father of modern management thinking.
The NMH Policy Commitment Tracker is a public accountability platform that tracks mental health-related laws, policies, financing commitments, and implementation progress across Nigeria. The tracker brings together commitments made by federal and state governments, public institutions, and development partners into a single, accessible system that allows users to follow what has been promised, who is responsible, and what progress has been made. Rather than functioning as a static database, the tracker is designed to monitor implementation over time; each entry is linked to source documents, mapped to responsible stakeholders, assigned timelines where applicable, and periodically updated as new evidence becomes available. At its core, the tracker exists to make mental health commitments more visible, measurable, and publicly accountable.
Methodology and Classification
The tracker is structured around three data areas:
Policies, Laws, and Frameworks: National legislation, state-level frameworks, strategic plans, implementation roadmaps, and suicide prevention or psychosocial support frameworks.
Commitments: Specific targets, budgetary or financing pledges, service expansion goals, workforce development, data system reforms, and programme milestones extracted from official documents and public statements. Where possible, these are linked to timelines and measurable indicators.
Stakeholders: Mapping institutions responsible for implementation, oversight, coordination, or technical support, ranging from federal and state ministries to multilateral partners and civil society.
Each commitment is coded using a standardized framework that includes category, institution, geographic level, target date, status, and source documentation. To ensure consistency and transparency, the following status framework is applied:
In-Force: The law or policy has received final assent and is currently the valid legal framework for the jurisdiction.
Completed: A specific, one-time target has been fully implemented with verifiable evidence.
Ongoing: The commitment represents a continuous program or a target that requires sustained effort over an indefinite period.
In-Progress: The commitment is actively moving through the implementation or legislative process but has not yet reached completion.
Delayed: The target timeline has passed or implementation has significantly stalled without evidence of progress.
Pending: The commitment has been announced or adopted, but implementation activities remain publicly undocumented.
Data Integrity, Scope, and Feedback
The tracker relies entirely on verified sources, including official government policy documents, gazette notices, budget expenditure reports, and reports from the WHO and development partners. It is updated periodically as new institutional reports become available, with all revisions reviewed internally to maintain accuracy. Feedback and corrections may be submitted by stakeholders, researchers, journalists, practitioners, and members of the public, and all submitted information is rigorously reviewed against available evidence before changes are made.
Please note that the tracker reflects publicly available information at the time of publication; the absence of a policy or commitment from the tracker does not necessarily indicate an absence of activity on the ground.
Why This Tracker Matters
Nigeria’s mental health sector is undergoing significant policy and systems reform. However, commitments are often spread across multiple documents and institutions, making long-term tracking difficult. The NMH Policy Commitment Tracker helps address this gap by creating a centralized accountability system. Mental health reform cannot rely on announcements alone; commitments that cannot be tracked are easy to abandon. By making these pledges visible and time-bound, the tracker aims to strengthen transparency and support evidence-based advocacy for better mental health governance in Nigeria.
Help Us Improve! If you would like to add a new policy/commitment made, update existing information, or share general feedback, please fill out this short update form.