Report: Health Worker Abductions Soar Nationwide
Ninety one health workers were abducted and 15 others killed across 101 separate incidents of violence against healthcare in Nigeria between 2023 and 2025, according to conflict monitoring data compiled by the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition, laying bare the scale at which the country’s already fragile medical workforce is being drawn into the frontlines of its security crisis.
The figures appear in the coalition’s annual report, *Care in the Crosshairs: Violence Against Health Care in Conflict 2025*, which draws on incident monitoring by Insecurity Insight, an organisation that tracks attacks on health systems worldwide. The global edition of the report was released in May 2026, with detailed country profiles, including Nigeria’s, following in subsequent weeks. It remains the most current comprehensive dataset available on the crisis.
The year by year breakdown shows a steady escalation. Nigeria recorded 24 incidents in 2023, with 24 health workers kidnapped and six killed. By 2024, incidents had climbed to 34, with 35 kidnapped and three killed. In 2025, the figure reached 43 incidents, a 79 per cent rise over 2023 and the highest in the three year window, with 32 workers seized in 21 separate abduction incidents and six killed in five incidents.
The pattern within those numbers is instructive. Kidnapping incidents alone rose by more than 70 per cent in 2025 compared with 2024, even though the total number of workers taken was slightly lower. Fewer people are being taken per incident, but abductions are happening far more frequently, a signature of opportunistic, profit driven criminality rather than coordinated mass seizures.
The human cost extends beyond the headline count. The report states that 25 of the abducted health workers remain unaccounted for, their fates unknown at the time of compilation. Only 10 were confirmed released. In one case that captures the precariousness of survival, a doctor who was shot and kidnapped in late December 2025 and released in January 2026 was shot again and killed on his return.
Perhaps the most consequential finding is geographic. Ninety five per cent of health worker kidnappings in 2025 took place outside Nigeria’s North East, largely in the North West and North Central zones where kidnapping for ransom has become an entrenched criminal economy.
“Most kidnapped health workers were abducted outside Nigeria’s northeast in areas where kidnappings for profit are common,” the report read.
Incidents in 2025 were recorded across 16 states, four more than in 2024, with fresh cases emerging in Anambra, Adamawa, Kano, Ondo, Edo and Nasarawa. Attacks in Zamfara State, already among the most insecure in the federation because of communal militia violence, nearly tripled compared with 2024. Violence in that state displaced more than 74,648 people between December 2025 and May 2026.
Victims included doctors, surgeons, pharmacy owners and drivers, seized from hospitals, clinics, road ambushes and illegal checkpoints. Ransoms were demanded in several cases. In others, armed groups abducted health staff for a different reason entirely, compelling them to treat their own wounded fighters.
The report attributes most incidents to unidentified gunmen, a reflection of how difficult attribution has become in Nigeria’s fragmented conflict landscape. Where perpetrators were identified, the spread was wide.
Militia groups in Katsina were linked to two attacks on health centres in which workers were killed and injured. A Zamfara militia carried out a road ambush, kidnapping a health worker alongside civilians. Fulani militants armed with AK-47s and machetes raided a hospital, abducting and raping an unspecified number of women. ISWAP was linked to five incidents across Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states, mostly involving health facilities raided, set on fire and stripped of medicine and food supplies. Boko Haram ambushed an ambulance in Borno, injuring the driver and seizing the vehicle.
State actors were not exempt from the findings. According to the report, the Armed Forces and police allegedly arrested health workers on accusations of links to opposition groups in Katsina, Niger and Sokoto states. A separate airstrike by the Air Force targeting a militant camp killed a health worker who was treating a wounded fighter at the time.
Three health workers were killed in shootings inside hospitals in Edo and Katsina. Among them was a physiotherapist killed when gunmen stormed the University of Benin Teaching Hospital in Benin City, an attack that prompted staff at the facility to stage a protest on the premises.
The report read, “In 2025, six health workers were killed in five incidents, compared to three in three incidents in 2024 and six in five incidents in 2023.”
“Three health workers were killed in shootings inside hospitals in Edo and Katsina, including a physiotherapist who was killed during an attack by gunmen at the University of Benin Teaching Hospital. Following the attack, the facility’s health workers staged a protest on the hospital premises.”
In Kaduna State, unidentified attackers raided a nursing and maternity centre, abducting a health worker, a security guard and five patients, among them a woman nine months pregnant and a nursing mother with her infant.
The coalition documented 2,546 incidents of violence against or obstruction of healthcare across 33 countries in 2025, including 790 incidents in which hospitals were damaged or destroyed, 455 health workers killed, 218 kidnapped and 263 arrested. Violence rose in 13 countries. State forces accounted for 64 per cent of all incidents globally, some 1,625 attacks, driven largely by air strikes, drones, missiles and artillery in populated areas.
Set against that global tally, Nigeria’s 32 kidnapped health workers in 2025 represent roughly one in seven of every health worker documented as abducted worldwide that year. The country is not among the world’s most bombed health systems, but it ranks disproportionately high on abduction, a distinctly Nigerian variant of the crisis.
The report is framed around the tenth anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2286, adopted unanimously in May 2016, which called for the protection of health workers, patients and facilities in armed conflict. The coalition’s assessment is that the promise remains unfulfilled, with perpetrators rarely held to account.
The attacks landed on a health sector already absorbing a severe financial blow. Between 2022 and 2024, Nigeria received approximately eight billion dollars from the United States Agency for International Development for health programmes. The funding freeze imposed by the Trump administration in 2025 ended that flow, and the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition estimates that roughly 28,000 health workers lost their jobs as a result.
Abuja responded with a supplementary allocation of 200 million dollars directed at immunisation and epidemic response. The Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Professor Muhammad Ali Pate, framed the shift bluntly when he said, “The responsibility to provide healthcare for our citizens ultimately rests on us.”
Domestic financing, however, has not closed the gap. Of the N58.47 trillion proposed for 2026, roughly N2.48 trillion was earmarked for health, about 4.2 per cent of federal spending. The Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare itself received N2.149 trillion, or 3.67 per cent, down from N2.83 trillion in 2025. Combining all health related provisions across ministries brings the total to about N2.915 trillion, close to 4.98 per cent. Meeting the 15 per cent benchmark African leaders adopted under the 2001 Abuja Declaration would require roughly N8.7 trillion, leaving a shortfall of more than N6 trillion.
The Nigerian Medical Association rejected the allocation. Its Secretary General, Dr Benjamin Egbo, described the funding level as “simply unacceptable and grossly inadequate,” noting that it works out to about N10,400 per citizen a year, or roughly N870 a month.
Insecurity is compounding an exodus that predates it. The World Health Organisation recommends one doctor to every 600 people. The Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors has reported a national ratio of one doctor to 9,083 patients, and the Federal Ministry of Health estimates that about 391,230 doctors would be needed to meet the WHO threshold.
Distribution is as much a problem as scarcity. Southern states account for 62 per cent of the country’s medical professionals, northern states 28 per cent, and the Federal Capital Territory the remaining 10 per cent. That leaves the zones recording the sharpest rise in attacks with the thinnest coverage. Research has consistently ranked rising insecurity among the top drivers of emigration, second only to poor remuneration, in surveys of Nigerian physicians.
Violence against health workers is a subset of a national phenomenon. SBM Intelligence recorded at least 4,722 abductions across 997 incidents between July 2024 and June 2025, in which 762 people were killed, including 563 civilians. Kidnappers demanded more than N48 billion in that period, of which about N2.56 billion was confirmed paid. The North West accounted for 62.2 per cent of victims, with Zamfara alone reporting 1,203 abductions and Katsina recording the highest number of incidents at 131.
Official figures are contested. The National Bureau of Statistics, in its Crime Experience and Security Perception Survey covering May 2023 to April 2024, estimated 2,235,954 kidnapping incidents nationwide and N2.23 trillion paid in ransom, with 63.5 per cent of incidents in the North West and an average ransom of N2.67 million. Analysts have questioned the scale of those estimates, noting that the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project recorded 634 abduction incidents over the same period. The gap reflects methodological differences between household surveys and incident level monitoring, and readers should treat both as indicative rather than definitive.
The pattern documented in the report has continued into 2026. Dr Tony Eghagagara, Head of Medical Services at New Bussa General Hospital, was abducted from his private clinic in Borgu Local Government Area of Niger State on 22 April 2026, prompting doctors in the state to threaten a shutdown. Dr Edwin Emegakor, Medical Director of Crown Multi Specialist Hospital, Nkpor, was seized in Anambra State on 7 May 2026. Dr Uche Bonaventure Aguocha, an orthopaedic surgeon and past chairman of the NMA in Abia State, was abducted in late May 2026 while travelling from Imo State to Umuahia and regained his freedom on 2 June after nine days in captivity, ending a threatened indefinite strike.
In its statement following that release, the NMA in Abia warned that “the kidnap of healthcare workers is unacceptable and must not become normalised,” citing the still unresolved 2020 abduction of Professor Iweha, a former Chief Medical Director of Abia State University Teaching Hospital.
The operational consequence is a repeating cycle. Each abduction triggers ultimatums, threatened or actual withdrawal of services, and the temporary closure of facilities in communities that have few alternatives. Where a single doctor serves thousands, the removal of one person is not a personnel issue but a collapse in access.
What follows will turn on three variables. The first is whether the 2026 appropriation, already lower in real terms than 2025 and stripped of the American assistance that once cushioned it, can sustain frontline staffing in high risk states. The second is whether federal and state authorities move beyond condemnation to the protective measures the NMA has repeatedly demanded, including hardened security around hospitals and prosecution of perpetrators. The third is accountability. A decade after Resolution 2286, the coalition’s central finding is that almost no one is punished for attacking healthcare, in Nigeria or anywhere else.
Until that changes, the monitoring data suggests the trajectory is unlikely to reverse.