Nigeria CPD for Nurses and Doctors: 20 Units and the MCPDP

Nigeria requires continuing professional development of both doctors and nurses, and ties both to the practising licence. The difference is that the medical regulator publishes its figures and the nursing regulator does not.

Doctors need 20 credit units a year. Nurses need a certificate of attendance at the Mandatory Continuing Professional Development Programme, with no published number of programmes, modules or hours attached to it. This guide sets out both, with the provider fees in full, since those are the most commercially useful numbers in either scheme.

Doctors and dentists: 20 credit units a year

The Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria states that CPD participation is a mandatory requirement for licence renewal by all doctors.

• 20 credit units annually, or 40 units for a two-year licence renewal.
• One credit unit equals one contact hour under qualified, approved tutelage. For practical and hands-on skills training, two hours equal one credit unit.

Seven groups, and you must use at least three

Credits are earned across seven groups: conferences, seminars and workshops; grand rounds and clinical meetings; self-learning including online; journal clubs, research and publications; revision and update courses; a miscellaneous group covering accreditors, examiners and resource persons; and management, information technology, medical informatics and medical education.

Credits must come from at least three of the seven groups. That is the structural constraint, and it rules out meeting the whole requirement through conference attendance alone. Activities are additionally classed as core, meaning medical and clinical, or non-core.

Self-directed learning counts. Self-learning, including online and website learning, is one of the seven groups in its own right — which is not the case in Hong Kong nursing, for instance.

International activity counts too, subject to local accreditors scrutinising the certificate and the course content.

Exemptions

Two are published, and the first is unusually generous:

• Practitioners aged 70 and above are exempt from accumulating credits.
• Those with debilitating ill-health for up to six months are exempt on evidence.

Carry-forward is not addressed in any Council source, so no banking rule should be assumed.

Tied to the annual licence

The Council December 2025 briefing note confirms the mechanism: licences for the following year are issued from the fourth quarter specifically to allow practitioners sufficient time to undergo continuing medical education for the year, with licences valid for twelve months from 1 January.

Two honest gaps. No specific sanction for non-compliance is published beyond CPD being a condition of renewal, and no procedure is published for what happens at renewal if credits are short. And the Council CPD page is undated — the only date on it is a kick-off workshop of 26 and 27 July 2007. No dated regulation, legal notice or council resolution establishing the 20-unit requirement could be found, which is worth knowing if you need to cite the authority rather than the figure.

One clarification from May 2026

Reporting of a statement by the Registrar clarified that the Council CPD Training Platform is not compulsory — its courses are Council-approved but do not displace other approved providers — while CPD itself remains compulsory, described as remaining a compulsory policy of the Council irrespective of the platform. The platform was free until 31 May 2026, after which subscription fees apply, and house officers, National Youth Service Corps doctors and Council resource persons have mandatory courses on it, free for their first two years after graduation.

That rests on a news report of a Council statement rather than a Council page, so treat the platform details as indicative.

Provider accreditation, with the real costs

These are the figures anyone considering the Nigerian medical market needs, and they are steep:

• Application fee: ₦20,000
• Visitation fee for fresh independent providers: ₦1,000,000, plus the applicant pays transport for three Council accreditation team members
• Recognition fee for medical or dental specialty societies and associations: ₦200,000
• Annual renewal: ₦100,000 for specialty societies and associations, ₦250,000 for independent providers

All payments are non-refundable and made through the applicant profile on the Council portal. The one-million-naira visitation fee for independent providers is the decisive number: it makes speculative entry impractical and strongly favours routing through an existing specialty society.

The requirements reinforce that. The chief executive or chief promoter must be a registered medical or dental practitioner, and the provider needs at least three medically qualified resource persons, with credentials and current annual licences supplied for each. Accreditation should take no more than three months from application and lasts two years, renewable. Certificates must bear the Council logo and the provider accreditation number, and attendee lists must reach the Council within 48 hours of an activity.

One inconsistency in the published material: the two-year accreditation term does not square with the annual renewal fees on the provider requirements page, and the two could not be reconciled.

Nurses and midwives: attendance, with no published figure

The Nursing and Midwifery Council of Nigeria requires that, at licence renewal, the applicant upload a scanned copy of the original certificate of attendance for the Mandatory Continuing Professional Development Programme. Practising licences are renewed every three years.

So the requirement is real and it gates the licence — without the certificate the renewal application is not complete. What is missing is everything that would let a nurse plan around it.

No number of MCPDP programmes, modules, credit units or hours is published by the Council. Nor are mandatory categories, carry-forward rules, exemptions, or whether self-directed learning counts. The MCPDP guidelines landing page is a notice to private providers and contains no requirement figures; it is undated apart from a 2022 copyright line.

An older Council licensing form states that the applicant must have attended at least one continuing education programme in their area of discipline. That form should not be relied on: it also quotes a ₦5,000 three-year renewal fee payable by bank draft and a penalty running from 1991, so it long predates the current fee schedule, and it carries no date.

On consequence, the Council cites section 5 of the amended Decree 54 of 1988 to the effect that no nurse may practise or continue to practise in a year without a current licence, with a penalty applying per year of default on late renewal.

The renewal fee itself is also unsettled. The Council renewal page states ₦13,125 for three years with a ₦6,562 penalty per year of default, while its licensing page states ₦10,500 and ₦5,250. Both are Council pages and they disagree; the consolidated fee document could not be read. Which figure is current is unestablished.

One widely-shared claim should be treated carefully. An August 2026 news report describes the MCPDP fee rising from ₦20,000 to ₦40,000 and says nurses must now complete two MCPDP programmes for renewal, putting the cost near ₦80,000. The article itself calls this a reported increase, names no circular or council resolution, and the Council confirms neither the fee nor the two-programme rule. It is not established.

Nursing provider accreditation, which is published in full

In contrast to the practitioner requirement, the Council guidelines for private providers of the MCPDP are specific:

• Application fee: ₦50,000, non-refundable, with the application
• Accreditation or approval fee: ₦250,000 after approval
• Renewal fee: ₦100,000
• Plus 5 per cent of total income remitted to the Council on an ongoing basis

Accreditation lasts three years, renewable after Council evaluation. The requirements include a Corporate Affairs Commission certificate of registration, Council approval before the programme starts, a full programme document with contents and resource persons, a head-office inspection, and a Council representative monitoring the first programme. Each session needs a pre-test and a post-test, and certificates carry the Council logo and the provider Council-assigned number and are co-signed by the Council.

The provision that most shapes who can enter: at least 30 per cent of board members must be nurses or midwives holding a current Council licence. Combined with the 5 per cent revenue share, this is a demanding structure for an outside provider — the revenue share in particular is unusual and should be modelled rather than treated as a formality. These guidelines are undated.

On logging, the Council portal is a licence-application system with document upload rather than a CPD points log. Renewal and payment run through it; there is no published points-tracking function.

The practical position

A Nigerian doctor needs 20 credit units a year, or 40 for a two-year renewal, drawn from at least three of seven groups, with self-learning counting and a full exemption at 70.

A Nigerian nurse needs an MCPDP attendance certificate every three years, and cannot determine from published sources how many programmes that means or what it will cost.

For providers, Nigeria is the most expensive market to enter of any in this series: a million naira visitation fee on the medical side, and on the nursing side a quarter of a million naira plus 5 per cent of revenue and a board composition requirement. Both are structured to favour established domestic institutions.

For comparison, Kenya charges KSh 15,000 for medical provider accreditation and publishes a full points tariff, Malaysia has no nursing provider accreditation at all and verifies points through the nurse supervisor, and India pre-authorises categories of provider and requires Council approval for anyone else.