Medicine taught Dr. Halimah Nuhu Sanda to care for the person in front of her. Public health taught her to look beyond that individual and ask why she had become vulnerable in the first place.
Was quality care within reach? Was a skilled health worker available? Could the referral system respond in time? Did the facility have essential supplies? Were leaders using reliable data to strengthen services?
These questions gradually expanded Halimah’s understanding of what it means to save a life.
“A good clinical decision can save one life, but a functioning health system can save thousands,” she says.
Her transition into public health was therefore not a departure from medicine. It was an extension of the same responsibility. She moved from treating individual patients to strengthening the policies, institutions, and community systems that give women, newborns, and families a greater chance of surviving and thriving.
That commitment makes her a fitting cover leader for Exeleon Magazine’s Women Advancing Public Health in Africa edition.
Staying Close to the Patient
Although Halimah’s responsibilities now span health systems, advocacy, education, and social development, she has not completely stepped away from clinical practice.
Whenever her schedule allows, she provides pro bono clinical services at a teaching hospital in Kano. For several years, this was an almost weekly commitment. While the frequency has changed as her responsibilities have grown, the work remains an important part of her identity as a physician.
Clinical practice keeps her close to patients and families. It also ensures that conversations about policy, data, and health-system reform remain connected to the realities experienced inside hospitals and communities.
Maternal and newborn health has been particularly influential in shaping her work. Nigeria continues to carry a significant share of the global maternal mortality burden, while many women still give birth without a skilled attendant present.
For Halimah, these figures reveal more than gaps in service utilization. They expose questions of trust, access, continuity, workforce availability, and whether health systems can respond when women need them most.
“Behind every statistic is a woman, a newborn, a family, and a community,” she says.
The consequences of a preventable maternal death extend far beyond one patient. Children, households, and entire communities carry the loss.
Public Health Cannot Be Designed from a Distance
Halimah’s early public health work focused heavily on HIV/AIDS, which was among Africa’s most prominent health concerns at the time. The experience gave her a foundation in prevention, community engagement, program implementation, and the use of data.
As she spent more time working with communities, however, she began seeing a much wider health continuum.
HIV could not be separated from sexual and reproductive health. Maternal health was connected to family planning, adolescent health, child survival, and access to skilled care. Each outcome was influenced by the strength of the primary healthcare system surrounding the individual.
Her core professional focus subsequently evolved toward sexual, reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health, alongside primary healthcare delivery and health-system strengthening.
The communities she served also taught her to question interventions that appeared effective on paper but did not reflect how people actually lived, made decisions, or sought care.
“A program can be technically sound and still fall short if it does not respond to how people actually live,” Halimah explains.
Sustainable public health requires functioning institutions, capable health workers, reliable data, and quality services. It also requires relationships. Families, women, young people, traditional leaders, religious leaders, and community institutions must be able to participate in shaping the response.
Halimah’s approach begins with listening, understanding context, recognizing existing strengths, and developing solutions that communities can own.
Reaching the Girl Before She Becomes a Mother
ROMZAIB Foundation emerged from Halimah’s conviction that professional expertise must eventually translate into practical impact.
After years of observing how unequal access to healthcare and opportunity disproportionately affected women, girls, and children, she wanted to create a platform capable of responding directly at the community level.
The Foundation works at the intersection of health, girls’ education, and empowerment. For Halimah, these areas cannot be separated.
“We cannot talk seriously about maternal and reproductive health without also paying attention to the girl before she becomes a mother,” she says.
Education can influence when a young woman marries, when she begins childbearing, how confidently she makes decisions about her health, and what economic choices become available later in life.
Halimah is careful not to portray families in Northern Nigeria as indifferent to their daughters’ futures. In her experience, parents want their daughters to succeed. What is frequently missing is the means.
A school may be too far away. Female teachers may be unavailable. Uniforms and learning materials may be unaffordable. Inadequate water and sanitation can cause girls to miss school during menstruation. Families may also struggle to see a credible pathway between completing school and securing a meaningful future.
ROMZAIB works alongside families, schools, traditional institutions, and religious leaders to help close these gaps.
Turning Evidence into Practical Action
One of the Foundation’s initiatives, Let it Flow, addresses period poverty as both a health and education issue.
The program distributes reusable sanitary pads to girls attending schools in rural communities. The decision to use reusable products is deliberate. Disposable pads may solve the problem for one cycle, but they recreate the same financial burden the following month. Reusable pads provide support across several cycles while reducing household costs and disposal challenges.
The objective is straightforward: a period should never cost a girl her place in the classroom.
ROMZAIB has also established a midwifery scholarship initiative for girls from underserved communities in Kano. Approximately 95 percent of beneficiaries come from rural Local Government Areas.
The scholarships address two connected gaps. They create educational opportunities for young women while helping develop skilled health workers who understand, and are more likely to remain within, the communities that need them.
Nigeria faces a substantial shortage of midwives, particularly in rural and underserved areas. Training young women from those communities offers a locally grounded response.
“A young woman trained from within her own community is far more likely to stay and practice there,” Halimah explains.
ROMZAIB intends to expand the number of scholarship beneficiaries and eventually extend support into fields including medicine, engineering, journalism, and law.
Taking a Pilot from Five Communities to Fifty
Among the formative experiences of Halimah’s public health career was helping scale Community Based Service Delivery from five pilot sites to 50 across Zamfara State.
The expansion demonstrated that a promising intervention could reach more people, but it also revealed the difference between proving an idea and building something sustainable.
“What works in a pilot is not automatically ready for scale,” she says.
A pilot may establish that an intervention is viable. Scale demands financing, supervision, reliable data, human resources, clear accountability, and the ability to adapt to different communities without sacrificing quality.
Halimah is equally clear that the achievement belonged to a wider team. Managers, mentors, drivers, field teams, health workers, and community members all contributed to the outcome.
The experience changed the questions she asks at the beginning of an intervention: Who will own it? Who will finance and supervise it? How will quality be protected? What evidence will show whether it is working? What happens when external support ends?
“Scale is not simply about doing more,” she explains. “It is about building the partnerships, capacity, and systems that allow a good intervention to continue.”
Seeing Northern Nigeria Beyond Its Challenges
Halimah believes outsiders often understand Northern Nigeria only through narratives of inequality, poor health outcomes, and limited educational access.
The challenges are real, but they are not the whole story.
The region also possesses strong community structures, influential traditional institutions, significant human capital, and women and girls with ambition, resilience, and ideas.
“I am particularly cautious about narratives that portray Northern women and girls only as victims,” she says. “They face real structural barriers, but they also have agency.”
Solutions cannot simply be imported and imposed. Sustainable change must be locally owned and informed by the religious, cultural, and social context of the communities involved.
This does not mean accepting every existing condition. It means understanding that change lasts when it travels through institutions and relationships that people already know and trust.
Whether the objective is increasing skilled birth attendance, improving vaccination coverage, or keeping girls in school, the response must consider household decision-making, transportation, community norms, trust, and the influence of local leaders.
The strongest solutions, Halimah believes, combine credible evidence with local wisdom.
When Impact Becomes Part of Everyday Life
Halimah defines meaningful impact as change that becomes part of people’s lives rather than remaining a successful project on paper.
In public health, that means fewer preventable maternal deaths, healthier newborns and children, stronger primary healthcare systems, and access to quality services without financial hardship.
For girls, impact extends beyond school enrollment. It means having the health, confidence, knowledge, and opportunity to determine the direction of their own lives.
Over the next decade, Halimah wants ROMZAIB Foundation to demonstrate what locally driven investment in women, girls, and children can achieve across Northern Nigeria. She envisions the Foundation strengthening partnerships, contributing to evidence, and helping successful community interventions influence wider policies and programs.
Her own leadership will continue to sit at the intersection of clinical practice, reproductive and maternal health, health systems, policy, advocacy, and diplomacy.
She has already served in roles including Honorary Adviser to the Executive Governor of Kaduna State on the Sustainable Development Goals, Chairperson of Child Solidarity Group, and a member of the Governing Board of Sterling Bank’s Health Workers Fund. She was also recognized among Opportunities Hub’s 100 Most Influential Young People in 2022.
Yet the legacy Halimah seeks is not defined by titles.
She wants to help create a Nigeria where geography does not determine whether a woman survives pregnancy, where a girl’s circumstances do not limit her potential, and where strong health systems are recognized as an investment in national development.
“If, a decade from now, more women are alive because systems became stronger, more girls are educated because barriers were removed, and more communities have a meaningful voice in shaping the services they receive, I would consider that meaningful impact.”
For Dr. Halimah Nuhu Sanda, that is the true measure of leadership: not simply treating the consequences of inequality, but strengthening the systems, opportunities, and communities that can prevent those consequences from occurring.