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Maize provides approximately 30% of the total calories of more than 4.5 billion people in developing countries, and is the most widely eaten food staple in Africa. Poor quality diets, dominated by food staples, are often deficient in minerals and vitamins, but maize can provide sufficient quantities of Provitamin A (proVA), which the body converts to Vitamin A.
Maize can grow in diverse environments and has a high potential to be bred to provide productive cultivars that are attractive to farmers and consumers, including for their nutritional properties.

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ProVA maize breeding is an excellent example of the effective use of both adapted and exotic genetic resources in crop improvement. Breeders found a wide range of levels of proVA carotenoids in temperate, tropical and subtropical germplasm during the initial screening studies (Ortiz-Monasterio et al. 2007; Menkir et al. 2008).
Most yellow maize grown and consumed throughout the world has on average only 2 µg/g proVA carotenoids. Tropical maize contains less beta-carotene than temperate maize, so the initial breeding sources of high proVA carotenoids were selected from temperate regions (Pixley et al. 2013; Menkir et al. 2017).

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Maize is the third most important cereal food in the world, and is a staple food for more than one billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. It is high in carbohydrates but lacks essential micronutrients such as vitamin A. Maize exhibits tremendous genetic diversity, and there are many types with high levels of beta-carotene, a naturally occurring plant pigment that is converted by the body into vitamin A when the maize is eaten. This genetic diversity has been used to conventionally breed new varieties of maize that are high-yielding and also rich in vitamin A. H

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VAD can be addressed in part by increasing the content of particular forms of carotenoids in the edible portion of crops that are consumed in areas affected by this nutritional problem. Carotenoids including α‐, β‐ and γ‐carotenes and β‐cryptoxanthin possessing β‐ionone rings can be converted by the body into vitamin A retinol, and thus often termed provitamin A (Grune et al., 2010; Yeum and Russell, 2002). Retinol is a component of rhodopsin, an essential protein for light perception by the eye (Zhong et al., 2012). Of the different carotenoids, the all‐trans‐form of β‐carotene is converted to retinol in the highest proportions and, thus, is the most nutritionally efficacious provitamin A form and the preferred target of biofortification efforts (Britton et al., 1998; Mayne, 1996). Cassava germplasm with elevated β‐carotene content has been identified and is currently being developed using conventional breeding strategies to address VAD in SSA (Njoku et al., 2014).

Despite successful development of single traits such as enhanced provitamin A, multigenic strategies are required to simultaneously address the nutritional, agronomic and postharvest storage limitations of cassava in a single variety. Combining multiple trait genes by conventional breeding in cassava is difficult because of high level of heterozygosity. In addition, desired traits, such as elevated iron and zinc accumulation in the storage roots, are not present within cassava germplasm. As such, a biotechnological approach for combining or ‘stacking’ beneficial trait genes was explored as a component of the BioCassava Plus program (Sayre et al., 2011). A cornerstone of BioCassava Plus was the development of provitamin A‐rich cassava, not only to meet the nutritional needs of populations that depend upon this crop as a primary food source, but also to improve agronomic performance and shelf life of harvested storage roots.

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The National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) has been in operation for over ten years but it seems to have failed in the realization of the objectives for which it was established. Key among its failures is the non-realization of the objective of making health care available to Nigerians at an affordable cost. As at date many Nigerians still pay out of their pocket for medical expenses; a retrogressive health care funding mechanism. This has continued to drive many families to catastrophic health expenditures and poverty. There is therefore an urgent need to review the scheme with a view to finding out factors responsible for its poor performance and proffer solutions that can lead to improvement in the scheme. This is necessary in order to accelerate the expansion of the scheme to cover many Nigerians within the shortest possible time.

The National Health Insurance Scheme was set up with the objective of making health care accessible and affordable to many Nigerians. However this lofty objective has been undermined by many factors. These factors have directly or indirectly contributed to the slow pace of success in the National Health Insurance Scheme. Addressing these factors is key to the success of the scheme. Find below the list of factors that have contributed to the failure of Nigerian health insurance scheme

The world health statistics report 2010 showed that neonatal mortality rate(probability of dying by day 28 of life) per 1000 live births as at 2008 was 494. This is against 3 in the Netherlands at the same time. The infant mortality rate in 2008(probability of dying by age one) per 1000 live births was 96 as against 4 in the Netherland. The under- five mortality rate (probability of dying by age 5) was 186 as against 5 of the Netherland. The WHO using the index; disability adjusted life expectancy ranked Nigeria as the 163rd out of 191 countries with respect to life expectancy 5. This index attempts to assess population health using indices like probability of survival and quality of survival. According to this index, life expectancy in Nigeria is 48.4years. This is worse than even our next door neighbour Ghana which has a life expectancy of 61.9 years using 2011 estimate5.

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