Private healthcare sector growing in Africa
AFRICA’S healthcare needs are huge and increasing, with most governments struggling to provide healthcare to their people. The private sector, with foreign and domestic investors, is becoming increasingly important. Estimates suggest that private healthcare now accounts for 60% of all African health care. The reason is Africa’s growing middle classes.
The tiny country of Lesotho has its first new hospital for many years. The 425-bed National Referral Hospital in the capital Maseru will replace the aged Queen Elizabeth II with eight well-equipped operating theatres, an intensive care unit and a laboratory when it opens next March. The building is a public-private partnership between South Africa’s biggest private healthcare operator, Netcare, the Development Bank of South Africa and the Lesotho government, overseen by the World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation.
Governments cannot afford to build and open hospitals from their own resources, so private finance holds the key to improving the continent’s cash-starved and chaotic healthcare sector. While some private clinics are opening, most African governments prefer the public-private partnership model as it allows treatment for millions who cannot afford healthcare, with hospitals financed by companies who will mainly make their money from private healthcare for the increasing number of Africans who can afford private care, either from their own resources or health insurances.
Netcare’s model is one it plans to roll out in Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Central African Republic, Ghana and Zambia and the DR Congo. Under Netcare’s structure, the Lesotho government will buy back the hospital over 18 years. Citizens get access to quality care in a hospital designed and operated by the private sector and the new hospital will offer better salaries and help retain Lesotho’s health professionals. At the end of the concession, the government gets a modern, well-equipped and maintained hospital.
The returns on investment may be lower than an entirely private venture but the partnership model avoids problems in unstable nations, where a change of regime could instantly take over a private hospital without compensation, or refuse to allow profits to be repatriated to the investor country. Over the long term, it puts those companies on good terms with governments across Africa.
Although much of the attention on health care in 45 sub-Saharan African countries centres on government activity, the private sector plays a surprisingly significant and growing role in meeting the region’s health care needs. Research by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) found that the increasing demand for health care due to improved economic growth across much of the region could translate into $20 billion of additional investment in the region’s private-sector health care infrastructure in the coming decade.
Governor Babangida Aliyu of Niger State has condemned the widespread practice of public office-holders going abroad to seek treatment. Speaking at the opening of the Umaru Musa Yar’Adua Hospital in Sabon Wase, Niger State, he called it a national disgrace and asked the Federal Government to end the practice. While some medical cases are taken abroad because the facilities for handling them do not exist within the country, many trips are not necessary. Medical check-ups can be carried out in Nigeria; while for other ailments there is effective treatment in private hospitals, if not in their public counterparts.
There is a mood to make it harder for public office-holders and senior civil servants to embark on medical trips overseas, and increasing the capacity of local medical services to offer viable alternatives to going abroad. This will require commitment on the part of federal, state and local governments. Increasing the effectiveness of medical services within Nigeria is a longer-term project.
Source: IMTJ
