Oxfam flags Nairobi Women’s Hospital for human rights violation, financial extortion

Nairobi Women’s Hospital has been named in a damning report by Oxfam International looking into private hospital chains and other for-profit healthcare corporations that received funding from development finance institutions.

The hospitals then failed to subsidize the cost of health services but instead engage in what the report term as glaring human rights violations and financial extortion of patients.

The report titled ‘Sick Development’ revealed Nairobi Women’s Hospital’s biggest stakeholder Abraaj Growth Health Markets Fund (AGHF), has received funding from Germany’s DEG, France’s Proparco and the World Bank’s IFC.

Other investors were the Norwegian DFI Norfund, the African Development Bank (AfDB), the Southern African Development Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In 2016, Proparco, the British International Investment and IFC invested $10 million (approximately Ksh.1.4 billion0, $75 million or Ksh.10. 5 billion and between Ksh.14 and 21 billion respectively in the Abraaj Growth Health Markets Fund (AGHF), which in 2017 bought a 75 per cent stake in Nairobi Women's Hospital.

Despite these investments, the report highlighted some alleged or confirmed human rights abuses against patients by Nairobi Women's Hospital since 2017.

Cases of patient detention have been reported including that of a patient's deceased body held at the hospital over non-payment of a $9,700 bill (approximately Ksh.1.3 million), to a secondary school boy detained for 11 months for an unpaid bill of nearly $28,000 (approximately Ksh.3.9 million).

Back in October 2018, a court ruled that Nairobi Women's Hospital had acted unlawfully and in violation of the Kenyan Constitution.

Nairobi Women's Hospital CEO Dr Sam Thenya says the institution revised its policy in 2018 and again in 2021 to comply with the court ruling.

However, according to the Oxfam report cases of detention of patients were being recorded well into 2019.

In January 2020 an alleged internal communication from the hospital, dating back to 2018, was leaked, exposing the hourly and daily pressure apparently exerted by senior hospital managers on staff to increase admissions and delay discharges to ensure that income targets were met.

The report highlighted similar practices in Mozambique, Nigeria and Uganda.

It stated: the case of Nairobi Women's Hospital is illustrative of the dangerous inadequacy of due diligence, oversight and monitoring mechanisms for DFI investments.

The Oxfam report also raised concern about whether concrete and systematic scrutiny of investments will be put in place to prevent such cases from happening again in other investments.

On the part of the hospital, Dr Thenya says the fund came in as an investor, not a donor, terming it a commercial transaction. He further added that investigations should be targeted at the fund and hold accountable individual shareholders or investors and not the Hospital, which operates a profit-making business entity.