From pioneering career progression institute in 2025 to global presentation at FIP Congress, Nigeria charts new course for community pharmacy practice

The Association of Community Pharmacists of Nigeria (ACPN) has taken its pioneering reform of community pharmacy practice to the global stage, unveiling its Community Pharmacists Assessment and Career Progression Institute (CPACPI) framework at the 84th FIP World Congress of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences in Montreal, Canada.

The presentation marked another significant milestone in what has emerged as a purposeful leadership initiative by the ACPN to transform community pharmacy practice, strengthen professional development and reposition community pharmacists as critical players in primary healthcare delivery.

In 2025, ACPN took the pharmacy world by surprise by pioneering the introduction of CPACPI as a structured platform for assessing and advancing the careers of community pharmacists. The initiative was designed to address a longstanding challenge within the profession: the absence of a clear, competency-based career progression pathway for pharmacists working in community practice.

A year later, ACPN presented the framework and research underpinning the initiative before an international audience at the FIP World Congress held from August 30 to September 2, 2026, under the theme, “One Health, One Pharmacy – Bridging science, practice, and education.”

The landmark presentation was delivered on behalf of ACPN by its National Chairman, Pharm. Ambrose Igwekamma Ezeh, further placing Nigeria’s community pharmacy reform at the centre of international conversations on the future of pharmacy practice.

The four-day global congress brought together pharmacists, pharmaceutical scientists, educators, healthcare professionals and industry leaders from across the world to examine emerging trends in pharmacy, healthcare delivery, education, research and workforce development.

Against this global backdrop, the ACPN’s CPACPI presentation demonstrated how Nigeria is seeking to move community pharmacy beyond the traditional model of medicine dispensing into a structured, clinically driven and professionally progressive component of the healthcare system.

Speaking during the presentation, Pharm. Ezeh said CPACPI was conceived not merely as an academic innovation but as a deliberate strategy for developing a resilient and sustainable professional workforce.

“Our mission through CPACPI is not merely to create an academic milestone, but to build a resilient, sustainable workforce capable of delivering world-class primary healthcare,” he said.

He explained that the initiative was developed in response to real-world challenges confronting community pharmacists, including operational pressures, regulatory shortcomings, financial constraints and limited opportunities for structured career advancement.

The study presented at the congress, titled “The Implementation Gap: Perceived Barriers and External Threats to Community Pharmacists’ Participation in a Career Advancement Scheme in Nigeria,” drew on research involving 182 practising community pharmacists across Nigeria.

The research was conducted through the collaborative efforts of Iyeseun Asieba, Abdulmuminu Isah, Faith Ehi, Ngozi Udem, Kowam Raji, Charles Oluwaseyi and Chukwuemeka Ubaka, with institutional contributions from CPACPI Lagos, the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital, Enugu.

Findings from the study identified workload pressures, limited practice time and the high cost of training and certification as major barriers to participation in structured professional development.

The study further identified weak regulatory enforcement as the most significant systemic threat to community pharmacy practice, with illegal medicine outlets and increasing competition from patent medicine vendors also cited as major concerns.

According to the findings, more than three-fifths of respondents indicated that the demands of daily practice constrained their ability to participate consistently in career advancement programmes. The research also found that younger and mid-career pharmacists with fewer than 20 years of professional experience were significantly more concerned about the financial burden associated with professional development than their more senior counterparts.

Rather than allowing the findings to remain at the level of academic diagnosis, ACPN has incorporated targeted solutions into the CPACPI framework.

Pharm. Ezeh said the association would introduce tiered, subsidised professional development grants to reduce the financial burden on younger pharmacists, while flexible and self-paced digital learning modules would be deployed to enable practitioners to acquire additional competencies without significantly disrupting patient care.

He also called for stronger multi-agency enforcement against illegal medicine outlets and unaccredited vendors to protect professional practice and improve patient safety.

At the heart of CPACPI is a five-band career progression structure designed to remove the traditional career ceiling that has historically confronted community pharmacists.

Under the framework, practitioners can progress through five professional bands: Band 1, Community Pharmacist; Band 2, Senior Community Pharmacist; Band 3, Community Pharmacy Specialist; Band 4, Community Pharmacy Senior Specialist; and Band 5, Community Pharmacy Consultant.

Progression is based on measurable professional competencies, including specialised clinical care, mentorship, digital health integration and continuous quality improvement.

The model therefore seeks to replace career stagnation with a transparent, merit-based system in which professional competence, experience and continuous development determine advancement.

For ACPN, however, career progression is only one part of the broader transformation being pursued.

The association is also advocating greater recognition of accredited community pharmacies as private-sector primary healthcare facilities.

“There is a pressing need for government authorities, policy-makers, and national health authorities to identify and designate qualified community pharmacies as official primary healthcare facility providers in the private sector,” Ezeh said.

He argued that community pharmacies are among the most accessible healthcare points for millions of Nigerians and should therefore be formally integrated into the national primary healthcare delivery architecture and health insurance system.

According to him, such integration would expand access to healthcare, improve patient outcomes and reduce pressure on already overstretched public health facilities.

The CPACPI initiative has consequently evolved beyond an internal professional development programme into a broader healthcare reform proposition with implications for workforce development, primary healthcare, Universal Health Coverage and medicine safety.

Its presentation at the FIP Congress also provided ACPN with an opportunity to demonstrate that innovative solutions to healthcare workforce challenges can emerge from developing countries and subsequently provide lessons for other health systems.

The association believes that the Nigerian experience can serve as a model for other low- and middle-income countries seeking to maximise the contribution of community pharmacists to primary healthcare delivery.

Reflecting on the road ahead, Pharm. Ezeh stressed that the sustainability of the initiative would depend on collaboration among regulatory agencies, professional bodies, policymakers and other stakeholders.

“The long-term success of the CPACPI framework rests on our collective ability to bridge the gap between policy design and real-world execution,” he said.

He noted that regulatory support, financial accessibility, reduced workload barriers and stronger enforcement of market standards would be critical to ensuring that the career progression framework produces lasting results.

From its pioneering introduction in Nigeria in 2025 to its international presentation at the FIP World Congress in 2026, CPACPI has become a major expression of ACPN’s purposeful leadership agenda for community pharmacy.

For Nigeria, the significance goes beyond the creation of another professional institution. It represents an attempt to redefine what a community pharmacist can become, how professional excellence can be measured and rewarded, and how community pharmacies can be repositioned as vital components of a modern primary healthcare system.

The Montreal presentation has therefore given international visibility to a Nigerian-led model that seeks to turn community pharmacy into a more structured, competency-driven and clinically impactful profession—while demonstrating that purposeful leadership in healthcare can begin with identifying a problem at home and developing a solution capable of attracting global attention.