On April 29, 2026, the MTN Foundation, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC), and the Office of the Vice President (OVP) signed a Letter of Acceptance for Cooperation on the National Substance Use Survey in Nigeria, formalising a tripartite agreement to produce the first nationally representative evidence on drug use among secondary school students in the country. For the MTN Foundation, the survey marks a strategic escalation of its Anti-Substance Abuse Programme (ASAP), which has since 2019 reached 50,433 students and 1,496 teachers across 222 public secondary schools in 33 states and the Federal Capital Territory, with online advocacy campaigns extending messaging to over 87 million impressions.
The initiative addresses a well-documented evidence gap. Nigeria’s most recent national drug use data derives from the 2018 National Drug Use and Health Survey, which established a drug use prevalence of 14.4 per cent among Nigerians aged 15 to 64, nearly three times the global average, with cannabis as the most widely consumed substance and the highest concentration among the 25 to 39 age bracket. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, this baseline remains the most comprehensive national assessment available, yet its exclusion of in-school youth has left prevention programming without the granular data required for targeted intervention. The UNODC’s 2025 World Drug Report further notes that the overall trajectory in Nigeria points toward an increase in the number of people who use drugs since that 2018 baseline was established, reinforcing the urgency of current, representative data on adolescent initiation patterns.
The proposed survey will employ a comprehensive national methodology to capture in-school youth aged 12 to 18, the demographic window during which peer influence, risky experimentation, and undiagnosed mental health challenges converge to drive early substance initiation. Outputs are expected to include national and state-level prevalence estimates for specified substances, disaggregated data by age, sex, school type, and geographic zone, risk-factor analysis covering peer influence, family structure, academic performance, and mental health indicators, and local government-level granularity to support targeted resource allocation. The Vice President, in remarks at the signing, underscored the government’s commitment to operationalising the findings, stating, ‘We expect the findings to land as policy inputs, not as documents,’ and adding that the Office of the Vice President’s role ‘is not ceremonial, we are in this for the outcome.’
For the MTN Foundation, the survey carries both reputational and programmatic value. The Vice President’s public commendation of the Foundation as a thought leader in private-sector anti-drug abuse mobilisation validates a sustained investment in a single thematic area over six years. Programmatically, the survey data will enable the Foundation to refine ASAP’s targeting, measure programme impact against a credible baseline, and demonstrate return on social investment to internal and external stakeholders. The initiative also positions the Foundation within Nigeria’s evolving corporate sustainability landscape. As regulatory and investor expectations around environmental, social, and governance disclosure intensify, the capacity to generate and cite primary impact data rather than output metrics alone will become a competitive differentiator.
The National Substance Use Survey represents a maturation of the MTN Foundation’s approach to social investment, from programme delivery to evidence generation, from awareness to prevention policy, and from bilateral partnerships to multi-stakeholder governance architectures. The test of its value will lie in the speed and fidelity with which its findings are translated into government budgeting decisions, school curriculum revisions, and community intervention designs. The Foundation’s continued engagement through the dissemination and implementation phases will be critical to ensuring that the survey does not become another archived dataset, but rather the foundation of a measurable reduction in first-time substance abuse among Nigerian youth.