Mozambique: Gov’t wants to build 90 district hospitals over the next five years

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Mozambique: Gov’t wants to build 90 district hospitals over the next five years

10:23 CAT | 19 Jul 2019

Picture: Presidencia da Republica de Moçambique

Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi on Wednesday laid the first stone for the construction of a new hospital in Ponta do Ouro, in the southernmost district of Matutuine.

This coincided with the official launch of the initiative “One District, One Hospital”. This initiative, supported by the National Rural Development Fund, involves the construction of 90 hospitals in districts that do not yet have health units more complex than health centres. By about 2024, it is hoped that all 154 districts in the country will have hospitals.

The future Ponta do Ouro district hospital, some 118 kilometres south of Maputo, will occupy an area of 1.750 square metres, within a space of three hectares. It will include services such as a maternity ward, an operating theatre, emergency care, a waiting house for pregnant women, sterilisation, laboratories and a morgue.

It should take between nine and 11 months to build the hospital, which is budgeted at 150 million meticais (about 2.4 million US dollars, at current exchange rates). It will bring the total number of health units in Matutuine to 14, and will be the first reference hospital in the district.

Speaking at the launch ceremony, Nyusi said “we know that health is a right for all of us. It’s a form of inclusion and a form of achieving social justice”.

Onedistrictonehospital.pres_ — *Picture: Presidencia da Republica de Moçambique*

The initiative will be implemented by the Ministry of Health, in coordination with the Ministry of Land, Environment and Rural Development. The government intends the work to be done by Mozambican building companies, but the Health Ministry will lay down the rules including the standards that must be followed for each hospital.

Nyusi said that the title of the project did not mean that each hospital must be built in the district capital. The most appropriate sites for the hospitals would depend on where the population was most concentrated. Ponta do Ouro, for instance, is not the capital of Matutuine – that title is held by the town of Bela Vista.

Among the districts first in line to obtain new hospitals are Boane (Maputo province), Limpopo (Gaza), Mabote (Inhambane), Gondola and Guro (Manica), Machanga and Marromeu (Sofala), Chifunde (Tete), Pebane and Molumbo (Zambezia), Mogovolas and Lalaua (Nampula), Mecanhelas and Maua (Niassa), and Namuno (Cabo Delgado).

The total cost of the 90 new hospitals is put at 20 billion meticais [ around US$324.6 million]at current exchange rates]. The cost of each hospital will vary between 150 and 400 million meticais [around US$2.4 million and US$6,4 million at current exchange rates] , depending on size, which in turn will be determined by the size of the district population.

Nyusi said the Ponta do Ouro hospital will improve the quality of life of the residents of Matutuine, and solve the problem of people walking long distances into the South African province of Kwazulu-Natal when they need health care.

Source: AIM