A group of pregnant women exercise at the Karanda Mission Hospital in Mount Darwin, Zimbabwe on March 2.
| Photo Credit: AFP
Outside a hospital in rural Zimbabwe, scores of people wait patiently under trees or inside small tents for news of their loved ones.
Vendors sell snacks, fruits and drinks to drivers queuing at the gates of what has become an unlikely sought-after healthcare destination in the impoverished southern African country.
Zimbabwe’s public health system has all but collapsed under years of mismanagement, amid shortages of funds, staff, medicine and equipment.
When in need, those who can afford it, including government Ministers, fly overseas to seek treatment.
Some check into private, but relatively expensive clinics in Harare. Many others make the trip to Mount Darwin, a small village in the parched countryside about 200 km north of the capital and home to the Karanda Mission Hospital.
Funded by the Evangelical church of Zimbabwe and run by three North American doctors, the hospital originally set up to cater to rural folks has built a reputation as one of the best in the country.
The 150-bed clinic treats up to 1,00,000 people a year and is almost always full, says medical director, Paul Thistle, a Canadian physician.
Charging affordable rates, it draws patients from well beyond its catchment area. Some come from as far as neighbouring Zambia.
Ahead of elections in August last year, President Emmerson Mnangagwa opened a new “state-of-the-art” clinic in a battleground district of Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, Bulawayo. But critics say that for years, flashy ribbon-cutting exercises have not been followed by systemic reforms to salvage the health sector. Many hospitals lack equipment for magnetic resonance, radiography, cancer treatment and other procedures.
“The sector has suffered from years of gross under-funding and investments,” said Itai Rusike, who heads the Community Working Group on Health, an umbrella advocacy group. “The depleted health personnel are also highly demotivated owing to dwindling real incomes, poor working conditions and under-equipped health institutions.”
