Nigeria has been ineffective in providing quality social sector services to the people. The results are high child and maternal morbidity and mortality, low levels of adult literacy and poor academic performance, and high fertility that translates into rapid and unsustainable population growth. Availability and use of affordable child survival and maternal health measures is appallingly low. At least 15 percent of Nigerian children will die before their fifth birthday, while a Nigerian woman dies every three minutes from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Adult literacy actually declined during the decade of the 1990s, and fewer than 60 percent of children are in school.

Fertility is high, birth intervals are short, and contraceptive prevalence is low. Health and education indicators are much worse in northern Nigeria than in the rest of the country, demonstrating regional imbalance and inequity. The poor quality of education, coupled with lack of access, is encapsulating successive generations of the poor deeper and deeper into poverty.

Key constraints to the use of social sector services in Nigeria include their poor quality and lack of accessibility. In some areas of the country, there is constricted demand, and there is also a strong need for an improved policy environment, given the extremely low resource levels allocated to health and education in the Federal budget. The powerful linkages between health and education indicators argue for the strategic integration of programs in reproductive health and family planning, child survival and basic education where feasible and practical. This SO will use performance measures such as school persistence, immunization rates, and contraceptive prevalence. Targets are provisional, pending receipt of data from the 2003 NDHS.