A new continental declaration promises faster, joined-up outbreak detection across Africa. It does not bind a single government, and it leaves the hardest part, the law, to countries like Nigeria.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The Nairobi Declaration is a political commitment, not a treaty. Turning it into legal duties is left to national governments.
• Nigeria’s federal surveillance mandate is strong, but detection begins at state and local level, where the federal government has little direct control.
• The Quarantine Act dates from 1926, and the Data Protection Act was not written with routine cross-border health surveillance in mind.
• The smartest first step is not a new agency or a flurry of new laws. It is making existing laws and institutions work as one system.

An outbreak does not stop at the border. Its data often does.

Nigeria shares land frontiers with Benin, Niger, Chad and Cameroon, and every day traders, herders and displaced people cross them. Disease crosses with them. Akinloluwa et al. (2024) link the rising risk of cross-border outbreaks to armed conflict, displacement and deforestation, and to heavy movement along trade routes such as the Trans-Saharan and the Abidjan–Lagos corridor. When surveillance fails on one side of a border, both sides pay.

Collaborative surveillance is usually discussed as a technical challenge: laboratories, reporting tools, trained personnel. It is also a legal one.

An outbreak signal travels only as far as the law allows.

Someone must have the authority to collect the information, a lawful basis to share it, and a counterpart across the border who is obliged to act on it. Without all three, the best technology in the world sits idle.

On 30 April 2026, civil society and community organisations meeting on the sidelines of the World Health Summit Regional Meeting in Nairobi adopted the Nairobi Declaration on African Health Security and Collaborative Disease Surveillance (Resilience Action Network Africa [RANA], 2026). It is a political commitment, not a treaty obligation. Its significance for Nigeria lies in the agenda it sets and the accountability it invites.

This article sets out what the Declaration says, where it sits in the wider surveillance framework, how Nigeria’s health security architecture is built, and which legal barriers stand in the way of cross-border information sharing. Its argument is simple: Nigeria’s first task is to make its existing laws and institutions fit together as a system, and to legislate only where a real gap remains.

What the Declaration says, and what it leaves out

The Declaration rests on a few clear principles. It treats health security as both a public good and a right. It places communities, including informal health providers and frontline clinicians, at the centre of early detection. It gives civil society a legitimate governance role, and it insists that surveillance systems be nationally owned and predictably funded (RANA, 2026).

Its calls to action are addressed to specific actors:

• Heads of State and Government are urged to raise health security to the highest political level, to exceed the 15 per cent health budget target in the Abuja Declaration, and to create ring-fenced budget lines for surveillance, laboratories, preparedness and rapid response.
• The African Union, Africa CDC, WHO’s Regional Office for Africa, Regional Economic Communities and National Public Health Institutes are asked to put cross-border surveillance into operation through harmonised standards and systems, agreed thresholds, joint simulation exercises and designated cross-border focal points, and to establish a biannual continental accountability mechanism with civil society participation.
• National governments and parliaments are urged to integrate surveillance into national and subnational plans and budgets, adopt costed preparedness plans, and set a pathway to reduced donor dependence by 2040.

The signatories have also committed to reconvening within one year to review progress (RANA, 2026).

From a legal perspective, three features of the text stand out:

• It is soft law. It creates no binding obligations, and its force depends on uptake by governments and regional bodies.
• It is silent on two obvious anchors. It mentions neither the International Health Regulations nor the One Health approach, although its concerns overlap with both.
• It touches law only in passing. It asks that preparedness be reflected in laws, plans, budgets and spending, and goes no further.

The work of converting the Declaration’s priorities into legal duties therefore falls entirely to states such as Nigeria.

A crowded field: four layers of surveillance rules

The Declaration does not arrive in a vacuum. It joins a framework with several layers, each with a different legal character.

Global: binding, and recently updated. The International Health Regulations (2005) bind Nigeria as a State Party. They require states to maintain core capacities to detect, assess and report public health events, and to notify WHO of events that may constitute a public health emergency of international concern. Amendments adopted in 2024 entered into force on 19 September 2025. They add a new alert level, “pandemic emergency”, require States Parties to establish National IHR Authorities, and include provisions on equitable access to medical products and financing. Eleven of the 196 States Parties rejected the amendments (WHO, 2025). Under the NCDC Establishment Act 2018, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC) already serves as the IHR National Focal Point. Whether it, or another body, should also be the National IHR Authority is a question Nigeria must now settle.

Technical: a common language, not a law. The Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) strategy, set out in WHO’s regional technical guidelines, structures the detection, reporting and investigation of priority diseases from the community up to the national level (WHO Regional Office for Africa, 2019). It gives countries a shared operating vocabulary, but it is guidance, not law.

Continental: ambitious, but reliant on states. Africa CDC’s 2024 strategic framework on cross-border surveillance acknowledges that surveillance and data-sharing mechanisms in Africa remain largely national and fragmented. It aims to harmonise systems, improve information exchange, support joint outbreak investigations and build laboratory and workforce capacity (Africa CDC, 2024). Like the Declaration, it depends on member states to supply the legal machinery.

Regional: patchy. The West African Health Organisation, an ECOWAS institution, has adopted an instrument on cross-border cooperation, but Chad and Cameroon are not ECOWAS members and are not party to it. An earlier framework for the Abidjan–Lagos corridor secured agreement among technical officers but stalled for want of ministerial approval in some countries. As a result, Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Health, through Port Health Services, led the design of a separate multilateral framework with Benin, Cameroon, Chad and Niger (Akinloluwa et al., 2024). Nigeria’s eastern borders sit only loosely within the main West African arrangement, which makes bilateral and bespoke instruments especially important.

Nigeria’s own house: strong at the top, thin where detection begins

A federal system with a split mandate

The NCDC Establishment Act 2018 gives the Centre a statutory mandate for disease surveillance, laboratory networks, coordination of IHR operations and support to state and local governments (s. 3). Section 4(a) empowers it to demand and obtain relevant information, data and clinical samples.

What the Act does not do is impose an express duty on state governments, health facilities or private laboratories to notify the Centre of priority diseases. In practice, reporting rests on IDSR guidelines, goodwill and the Centre’s power to set standards.

The Constitution adds a further wrinkle. Quarantine appears on the Exclusive Legislative List (Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999, Second Schedule, Part I, item 53), so border health measures are a federal matter. Primary health care and most frontline detection, however, sit with states and local governments, which operate under their own health laws. The federal authority that must alert a neighbouring country therefore depends on information generated by institutions it does not control.

The picture is not bleak. WHO’s 2023 Joint External Evaluation found significant progress: Nigeria’s overall readiness score rose from 39 per cent in 2017 to 54 per cent in 2023, and points of entry were among the strongest technical areas. The same evaluation flagged weak subnational capacity, limited integration of the animal and environmental health sectors, and the need for sustained domestic financing (Nigeria Health Watch, n.d.; WHO, 2024).

An emergency law older than the country

Nigeria’s principal emergency statute is still the Quarantine Act, first enacted in 1926 and now Cap Q2, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004. It allows the President to declare dangerous infectious diseases and infected areas and to make regulations, and lets state Governors act where the President has not. Its penalty for breaching those regulations is a fine of N200, six months’ imprisonment, or both (Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre [PLAC], 2020).

The Act is silent on surveillance data, cross-border notification and safeguards for individual rights. The Senate passed a bill in January 2022 to repeal it and enact a National Health Emergency Act. The bill then awaited concurrence by the House of Representatives (PLAC, 2022), and unfortunately the Bill never made it to the former President’s table before the end of the 9th National Assembly.

The risk of building a second house next door

Reform proposals can add confusion as easily as clarity. In June 2026, the House of Representatives held a public hearing on the National Institute for Public Health and Infectious Diseases (Establishment) Bill, 2025. The NCDC opposed it, arguing that the proposed institute would duplicate functions the Centre already holds by statute and create a parallel command structure during outbreaks (“NCDC Opposes Proposed Public Health Institute Bill,” 2026). The Declaration’s emphasis on integrated, nationally owned systems points toward strengthening the existing mandate rather than splitting it.

Momentum and obstacles: what stands between Nigeria and seamless data sharing

The timing is helpful. The Declaration’s calls for cross-border focal points, agreed thresholds and joint simulations align with the multilateral framework Nigeria has been designing with its neighbours, and give it fresh political momentum. Nigeria also has operational tools to build on, including event-based surveillance through the NCDC and the SORMAS platform, which Akinloluwa et al. (2024) recommend for regional adoption to give neighbouring countries real-time visibility of outbreak data. The Declaration’s proposed accountability mechanism offers a forum in which Nigeria can demonstrate progress and press its neighbours for reciprocity.

The legal obstacles, however, are more demanding.

1. Data protection

The Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 classifies health status as sensitive personal data (s. 65). Processing it requires one of the conditions in section 30(1), which include processing for public health purposes subject to suitable and specific safeguards (s. 30(1)(h)) and processing for reasons of substantial public interest under a proportionate law (s. 30(1)(f)). The principles of purpose limitation, data minimisation and storage limitation in section 24 continue to apply.

Section 3(2)(b) relieves processing for the prevention or control of a national public health emergency from much of the Act, but expressly preserves sections 24 and 25. Routine surveillance outside a declared emergency therefore falls under the ordinary rules.

2. Sending data abroad

Section 41 prohibits the transfer of personal data out of Nigeria unless the recipient is subject to adequate protection or an exception in section 43 applies. The most relevant exception covers transfers for important reasons of public interest (s. 43(1)(d)). But that exception calls for a case-by-case assessment and offers little certainty for routine, high-volume exchange with neighbouring health authorities. Without adequacy determinations under section 42 or approved standard clauses, cross-border sharing of identifiable data rests on uncertain ground.

3. The form of the agreement

Under section 12 of the Constitution, a treaty has the force of law in Nigeria only once the National Assembly has enacted it into law. Memoranda of understanding between health agencies are useful working tools, but they cannot override statutory duties such as those in the Data Protection Act. Commitments on cross-border sample movement, joint investigations or isolation, which Akinloluwa et al. (2024) identify as highly sensitive, may need a firmer legal foundation than an agency-level memorandum can give.

4. Politics and practicalities

Governments are often reluctant to share surveillance data that might trigger trade or travel restrictions against them (Akinloluwa et al., 2024). And because Nigeria’s neighbours largely operate francophone, civil-law systems, any shared instrument must bridge different languages, legal traditions and data protection regimes.

Six steps from declaration to delivery

The Declaration’s priorities can be turned into a short reform agenda built on institutions Nigeria already has.

1. Start with a gap assessment. Nigeria should conduct a legal and institutional review covering the NCDC Establishment Act, the Nigeria Data Protection Act, the Quarantine Act, the National Health Act 2014, relevant state health laws and existing cross-border agreements. It should separate genuine gaps in legal authority from problems that clearer procedures could solve.
2. Settle the institutional questions. The federal government should designate the National IHR Authority required by the 2024 amendments, resolve the status of the health emergency bill, and amend the NCDC Act where necessary rather than creating a parallel agency. An express statutory duty on health facilities, laboratories and state authorities to notify priority diseases would close the most obvious gap in the reporting chain.
3. Write a governance code for public health data. The Nigeria Data Protection Commission can issue guidance under sections 3(4) and 30(3) of the Data Protection Act on the safeguards surveillance data requires. A standard data-sharing agreement for public health institutions should state the legal basis, permitted purposes, access controls, retention periods and accountability for misuse, and require anonymised or aggregated data wherever identifiable data is not necessary.
4. Finish and formalise the multilateral framework. The instrument with Benin, Cameroon, Chad and Niger should name focal points, set alert thresholds and response times, and provide protocols for joint investigation and sample transfer. It should be routed through the West African Health Organisation for ECOWAS partners, with bilateral arrangements for Cameroon and Chad. Where it imposes binding obligations, it should be domesticated under section 12 of the Constitution.
5. Give One Health and community surveillance legal footing. Veterinary, agricultural and environmental agencies need defined reporting duties and channels into the national system. Community informants and frontline workers need simple reporting routes, feedback, and protection against unnecessary disclosure of their identity.
6. Make financing and accountability measurable. Federal and state budgets should carry ring-fenced lines for surveillance, as the Declaration urges. Progress should be reported against clear indicators, such as timeliness of notification, laboratory turnaround times and the proportion of alerts investigated, and fed into the continental accountability mechanism and the one-year review the signatories have committed to.

The real test: alerts that arrive on time

The Nairobi Declaration adds political weight to a goal Nigeria already shares: faster detection of outbreaks and coordinated response across borders. It does not bind Nigeria, and it leaves the legal work to national governments. That work is substantial. Nigeria’s surveillance mandate is clear at the federal level but thin where detection begins; its emergency legislation dates from 1926; and its data protection law, though modern, was not drafted with routine cross-border health surveillance in mind.

The right response is targeted reform. Nigeria should test whether its current laws authorise the sharing that collaborative surveillance requires, fix the gaps it finds through amendments to existing statutes and clear guidance, and formalise its cross-border arrangements in instruments with legal force.

In the end, the Declaration will be judged not by its words but by its results: alerts issued on time, and outbreaks investigated jointly with Nigeria’s neighbours.

References

Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024). Strategic framework for strengthening cross-border surveillance and information sharing in Africa. https://africacdc.org/download/strategic-framework-strengthening-cross-border-surveillance-and-information-sharing-in-africa/

Akinloluwa, O. O., Lokossou, V., Okatubo, G., Okunromade, O., Nwitte-Eze, O., Alabi, S., Ajayi-Ogbe, T., Ofoegbunam, C., Sogbossi, L., Appolinaire, K., & Aissi, M. A. (2024). Towards a multi-lateral framework for cross-border surveillance and information sharing between Nigeria and neighbouring countries. BMJ Global Health, 9(3), e013011. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2023-013011

Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended).

Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (Establishment) Act 2018 (Act No. 18 of 2018).

Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023.

Nigeria Health Watch. (n.d.). Nigeria’s 2023 Joint External Evaluation: Progress in the right direction. https://nigeriahealthwatch.com/articles/torchlight/nigerias-2023-joint-external-evaluation-progress-in-the-right-direction/

NCDC opposes proposed public health institute bill, warns against duplication of functions. (2026, June 26). ThisDay. https://www.thisdaylive.com/2026/06/26/ncdc-opposes-proposed-public-health-institute-bill-warns-against-duplication-of-functions/

Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre. (2020). Factsheet on Quarantine Act 2004. https://placng.org/i/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Factsheet-on-Quarantine-Act-2004.pdf

Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre. (2022, January 27). Senate passes bill to repeal Quarantine Act 2004 and enact the National Health Emergency Bill 2022. https://placng.org/i/senate-passes-bill-to-repeal-quarantine-act-2004-and-enact-the-national-health-emergency-bill-2022/

Quarantine Act, Cap Q2, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004.

Resilience Action Network Africa. (2026, April 30). Nairobi Declaration on African Health Security and Collaborative Disease Surveillance. https://www.ranafrica.org/news/nairobi-declaration-on-african-health-security-and-collaborative-disease-surveillance/

World Health Organization. (2024). Joint external evaluation of the International Health Regulations (2005) core capacities of Nigeria: Mission report, 14–18 August 2023. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240102989

World Health Organization. (2025, September 19). Amended International Health Regulations enter into force. https://www.who.int/news/item/19-09-2025-amended-international-health-regulations-enter-into-force

World Health Organization Regional Office for Africa. (2019). Technical guidelines for integrated disease surveillance and response in the WHO African Region (3rd ed.). https://www.afro.who.int/publications/technical-guidelines-integrated-disease-surveillance-and-response-african-region-third