Nigeria Pharmacy Registry

Problem

Nigeria's pharmaceutical supply chain operates largely in the dark. There is no centralized, authoritative registry of licensed pharmacies and patent medicine vendors, no real-time visibility into drug stock levels, and no reliable mechanism for tracing dispensing back to regulated facilities. The consequences are significant: counterfeit and substandard medicines circulate freely, stockouts go undetected until they become crises, and patients in underserved communities cannot easily locate where specific medications are available.

The Pharmacy Council of Nigeria (PCN) maintains a licensing framework, but data is fragmented across state boards and rarely digitized in interoperable formats. NAFDAC manages drug approvals, but the link between approved products and dispensing outlets is effectively broken. The result is a system where regulatory intent and ground-level reality are almost entirely disconnected.

Approach

The Nigeria Pharmacy Registry is designed as a foundational infrastructure layer — not a patient-facing application, but the data substrate that patient-facing and regulatory applications can build on. The core design principles are:

• Registry-first architecture — a master list of licensed pharmacies and PMVs, structured around unique facility identifiers that can federate with NHIA, PCN, and NAFDAC data sources
• FHIR-aligned data model — using FHIR R4 Organization and Location profiles for pharmacy records, enabling interoperability with broader health information exchange infrastructure
• Mobile-first onboarding — recognizing that many community pharmacy operators work from mobile devices, registration and update flows are optimized for low-bandwidth, smartphone-based access
• Formulary integration — linking each registered facility to the NAFDAC-approved drug list, enabling verification of whether a dispensed product is registered and facility-appropriate
• Dispensing record hooks — lightweight transaction logging that enables aggregate analytics on drug movement without requiring full EHR-level documentation at point of care

The build sequence prioritizes the registry and facility identifier layer first, with formulary linkage and dispensing analytics as subsequent phases. The intent is to deliver usable infrastructure early rather than wait for a fully-featured system.

Design Targets

The registry is in active development. Targets for the initial deployment phase are anchored to coverage and data quality rather than downstream clinical outcomes, which will be measured in later phases.

Why This Matters

The pharmacy registry problem is not primarily a technology problem — it is a coordination problem. The data exists in fragments across regulators, state boards, and private operators who have no incentive to share it. A registry only becomes useful when enough of those fragments are connected to make the whole more valuable than any individual piece.

Getting that coordination right — establishing trust with PCN and NAFDAC, designing data sharing agreements that regulators can actually commit to, and building onboarding flows simple enough that a community pharmacist in Kano would complete them — is where the real work is. The FHIR implementation and API architecture are the easier parts.