The 2025 World AIDS Report by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, or UNAIDS, indicates a staggering 55% decline in condom distribution across Nigeria between December 2024 and March 2025.
This sharp decline is hardly an isolated incident; it reflects a broader crisis confronting HIV prevention and treatment in Nigeria in the aftermath of a collapse in global health financing.
For two decades, the Nigerian HIV response relied heavily on external funding, primarily through the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
2025, however, marked a paradigm shift in this dynamic, which UNAIDS characterises as the “worst setback in decades.” With shrinking donor funding, OECD projections show that global health financing could fall by 30% to 40% this year compared with 2023.
The persistent transition plan for Nigeria’s HIV response was based on the belief that as donor funding dwindled, domestic government financing would fill the void. That assumption has not held so far.
Although the Tinubu administration approved new budget lines for antiretroviral (ARV) medicine to fill gaps left by US cuts, funding for prevention commodities, such as condoms and lubricants, remains critically insufficient.
Domestic interventions have focused largely on treatment (keeping people alive) rather than prevention (halting new infections).
Calls for local production of condoms resurfaced yet again at the 2025 National Condom Summit. The Director-General of NACA highlighted Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) with pharmaceutical companies to strengthen local manufacturing.
But a massive gap persists between policy intent and market reality. Despite signed agreements, local output remains negligible against estimated national demand of more than 600 million units annually.
The country’s manufacturing environment is burdened by steep energy costs, currency volatility affecting raw material imports (latex) and weak infrastructure.
At the same time, inflation is pushing prices higher. The average import price of condoms into Nigeria rose to $18 per thousand units in 2024, driven by global latex prices and shipping costs.
With the naira sinking further, these increased import costs have spilt over to consumers. Market surveys from November 2025 show that retail prices have skyrocketed.
For example, the popular Gold Circle brand, once sold for N150-N200, now retails for N500 to N1,000 in roadside shops.
Severe fallouts from condom crunch
The decline in condom use portends a crisis that extends far beyond HIV. It may be driving a return to unsafe sex practices. Condoms remain the only accessible form of dual protection—that is, preventing both pregnancy and the full range of Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs).
Meanwhile, STIs are becoming harder to treat. A 2025 report warns that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is making common infections increasingly untreatable.
Condom shortages result in increased transmission of these bacteria. In Nigeria, the cultural tendency towards self-medication—buying antibiotics from patent medicine vendors without a prescription—fuels the development of resistant strains.
The scarcity is also expected to trigger a spike in unintended pregnancies. Health experts caution of a potential baby boom driven by the lack of contraceptives.
In a country with restrictive abortion laws, more unwanted pregnancies mean more unsafe abortions, a leading contributor to maternal deaths. The condom shortage, in fact, directly threatens Nigeria’s fragile maternal health indicators.
Ultimately, this shortage acts as a force multiplier, magnifying weaknesses across the system. It worsens PrEP shortages, accelerates drug resistance, deepens economic inequality by forcing the poor to pay more for basic protection and threatens to reverse years of progress in managing the HIV epidemic.
Without an immediate intervention, Nigeria risks sliding into a phase of the AIDS pandemic, one fuelled by an absence of political and financial will.
Summary not available at this time.
