How to vet a fertility clinic in Nigeria

The short answer

Ask every clinic how it calculates its success rate, and do not accept a number without a denominator. "We have a 60% success rate" is not a fact until you know 60% of what, in whom, and measured to what endpoint.

The success rate question, in detail

The same clinic, in the same year, can honestly publish wildly different numbers depending on what it divides by. Three definitions matter:

• Per cycle started. The hardest and most honest denominator. It includes the cycles that were abandoned before collection, which is exactly the group a flattering statistic drops.
• Per embryo transfer. Excludes everyone who never got as far as a transfer. Always a higher number than per cycle started, for reasons that have nothing to do with the clinic being better.
• Per patient, across all attempts. Useful for planning a budget over several cycles. Meaningless as a comparison between clinics unless both count the same way.

Then ask about the endpoint. A positive pregnancy test is not a baby. A clinical pregnancy is not a baby. The number that matters to you is the live birth rate, and a clinic that tracks its patients to delivery is a clinic that is willing to be measured.

Finally, ask for it banded by age. Outcomes fall markedly with age, so a single headline figure mostly tells you the age mix of the clinic's patients. A clinic that quietly declines the hardest cases will always look better than one that takes them.

The rest of the checklist

1. Who is the doctor, by name, and are they registered? Doctors in Nigeria are registered with the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria. Ask which consultant will be responsible for your care, not which clinic. Then ask how many cycles that person personally handled last year.
2. Who runs the laboratory? In IVF the embryology lab is the clinic. Ask who the embryologist is, how long they have been there, and what happens if they are travelling on the day of your collection. A clinic that flies in a visiting embryologist for a batch of cases is a different proposition from one with a resident team.
3. How many cycles does this clinic do a year? Volume is only one signal. A unit doing a handful of cycles annually is learning on your money.
4. Get the full cost in writing, itemised. The quoted package price is rarely the amount you pay. Ask specifically about drugs, which are often the largest variable cost and are frequently excluded, plus scans, anaesthesia, ICSI, freezing, annual storage, and what a failed or abandoned cycle costs you.
5. Ask what happens if the cycle is cancelled. Before collection, after collection, after fertilisation fails. Get the refund or carry-over position for each, in writing, before you pay.
6. Ask how many embryos they transfer. Transferring more embryos raises the chance of a pregnancy and raises the chance of a multiple pregnancy, which carries materially higher risk for both mother and babies. A clinic that pushes multiple transfers to improve its own headline number is optimising for its statistics, not your outcome. You want a clinic that discusses this rather than one that assumes.
7. Ask about storage and consent. Where are frozen embryos kept, what does storage cost annually, what happens if you stop paying, and what consent have you signed about their use or disposal. Read this part properly. It is the part people sign fastest.

Signals that should slow you down

• A guarantee. No clinic can guarantee a baby. A "money-back guarantee" package is a pricing structure, not a clinical promise, and it usually excludes the people most likely to need the refund.
• Pressure to decide today. Fertility treatment has a real clock, and that clock is a reason to be organised, not a reason to pay a deposit at a first consultation.
• Reluctance to give you numbers in writing. Costs, outcomes and cancellation terms should all survive being emailed.
• Testimonials instead of statistics. Photographs of babies are marketing. Age-banded live birth rates are evidence.

What reviews can and cannot tell you here

Reviews of fertility clinics are unusually unreliable in both directions. People who succeed are grateful and effusive. People who do not are often private about it. So the visible reviews skew heavily toward success in a way that does not reflect the underlying rate.

Read them for the things that are not about outcome: whether calls were returned, whether costs matched the quote, whether staff were kind on the bad days, whether the same doctor was there throughout. Those are the parts a review can actually establish, and they matter more than you expect during a hard cycle. Our general guide to reading Nigerian reviews applies here with extra force.

Bottom line

Ask for the live birth rate per cycle started, banded by age, in writing, along with a fully itemised cost including drugs. A good clinic will have these ready and will not mind the question. The reaction to being asked is, in practice, one of the most reliable signals available to you.