By Asma’u Ahmad
The Afreximbank said it will foster the emergence of world class health centres in Africa through its Health and Medical Tourism Initiative.
The initiative is to build centres of medical excellence across Africa in the bid to improve life expectancy and stem foreign exchange outflow from the continent.
Afreximbank President, Dr. Benedict Oramah, disclosed this while addressing participants at a workshop for prospective host countries of the centre in Cairo, Egypt.
He said that the range of specialist healthcare services to be delivered through the Centre of Excellence Initiative would enable Africa to stem the outflow of billions in scarce foreign exchange.
The bank president said that currently more than 300,000 Africans travelled annually to India alone for medical services, spending more than two billion dollars each year.
He attributed the situation to “lack of well-equipped and advanced medical facilities as well as practitioners across the continent, leading to millions of untimely deaths every year”.
He said that many of the existing medical facilities on the continent were not equipped to deal with the new kinds of ailments that were now prevalent due to changing lifestyles.
The Afreximbank boss said it was in response to this situation that the bank launched a Health and Medical Tourism Programme, working with partners like Kings College Hospital (KCH), London, to foster the emergence of world class medical facilities and research centres across Africa.
He said that the first area of healthcare specialisation that that strategic business alliance with KCH would focus on would the establishment of a Centre of Excellence for Cancer Patients.
He said that following a comprehensive review and macroeconomic analysis of the health sector and medical tourism in Africa carried out by KCH, Tanzania, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana were identified as suitable to host the centre of excellence.
Also speaking, Prof. Ghulam Mufti, a non-executive director on the Board of Kings College Hospital, outlined the health challenges facing Africa and urged the participants to aim to leave the workshop energized to address them.
According to him, the participants should aim to come out with plans on how to deliver the centre of excellence in a timely manner.
Participating in the workshop were representatives of the ministries of health and key players in the healthcare sectors from Tanzania, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana as well as officials from Afreximbank and KCH.
The workshop sought to clarify the thinking on the establishment of centre of excellence for cancer in Africa.
