Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

By Mathew Otieno

In many cases, the Catholic Church provides higher quality and more reliable healthcare in Africa than do governments.

The Catholic Church is the largest non-governmental provider of healthcare in Africa. In several countries, it is the largest healthcare provider, period. And that’s without saying anything about the healthcare systems that were established by Catholic missionaries but later co-opted, or nationalised, by governments.

In much of Africa, as in most of Europe, healthcare is widely considered to be a public good. It’s supposed to be free or low-cost, and the government is supposed to be the primary provider of services. For this reason, governments tend to be the main focus of international attention with regard to healthcare in Africa.

In reality, however, most African governments are pathetic healthcare providers. The facilities they run are, as a rule, so dilapidated, understaffed, dysfunctional, under-resourced, and unevenly distributed, that most Africans only consider getting treatment from them as a last resort.

What is more common is that non-governmental facilities provide a significant portion of the continent’s primary healthcare services. Of such facilities, there are two broad types. Since they are businesses, the strictly private kind tend to serve only the better-heeled members of society, and so exclude the vast majority.

It is from the other kind, the primarily non-profit facilities, most of which are faith-based, that the mass of African patients receive care. In a sense, it is these faith-based health systems that most accurately fit the public good model of healthcare in Africa. Not only do they fill the large gaps left by the private sector, but they are also decidedly more reliable than the ostensibly public government-run systems.

Africa’s Mission Field

Like most modern structures in Africa, faith-based healthcare has its origins in the colonial era, when missionaries established health facilities, usually alongside schools, to serve natives. In a few cases, it was a tool for entrenching colonial rule. Most often, it filled a gap left by colonial governments, which were rather lethargic about seeing to the health and education of the locals.

By independence, most of the continent’s healthcare was provided by facilities established by Christian missionaries. Many independent African governments, keen to cement their control of their countries’ healthcare systems, nationalised many of these facilities (again, often alongside the schools); this is how most government-run health systems in Africa got their start.

Naturally, the degree to which this was done differed across the continent. In some countries, like South Africa, most faith-based facilities got nationalised and integrated into government-run systems. In others, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Kenya, faith-based providers were mostly left alone, or unsuccessfully nationalised, and now account for more than half of the health system.

Most countries are somewhere in between. They tried to nationalise faith-based facilities, but either failed to do so or, having nationalised them, subsequently ran them to the ground, so that they were handed back to their original operators, or the resulting slack was picked by new facilities established by the dispossessed missionaries.

The result is that, even today, faith-based facilities are the main source of healthcare services in many parts of the continent. And given that the Catholic church is by far the most significant player in the faith-based healthcare sector, it may very well be said that the Catholic church is the backbone of the continent’s healthcare system. Like all bold claims, this one requires bold evidence (which I hope I have already given), but it is hardly controversial.

Catholic Sexual Ethics

If there has been any controversy, it has been about the influence of Catholic values on the manner in which Catholic facilities provide care. The first wave of controversy, at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the mid-2000s, concerned the provision of care to HIV/AIDS patients. In particular, the Catholic church’s disapproval of condom use, which meant that Catholic facilities could not dispense them, drew no small amount of ire and derision.

More recently, controversy has revolved around sexual and reproductive healthcare and rights (SRHR), which is the rather cumbersome euphemism for contraception and abortion. The Catholic church disapproves of both, and hence its health facilities cannot provide them. And since it is the primary provider in so many regions, those regions are, in effect, locked out of such services.

Given how much ink has been spilled on both issues, one would think these controversies have been more universal. On the contrary, they have been almost exclusively Western. In Africa, especially in the communities served by Catholic health facilities, there has hardly been a peep about them.

This shouldn’t be surprising, except to the most dyed-in-the-wool highly privileged Western activist. For ordinary Africans, jaded by lacklustre government service, and excluded by elitist private providers, Catholic healthcare is a blessing. It is affordable, accessible, good quality, caring and reliable. Its values are centred on human dignity, which makes it truly welcoming to all who need it.

No amount of controversy has been able to dent this reputation. And it’s unlikely any will in the foreseeable future. Western activists be damned.

___

Republished with thanks to Mercator. Image courtesy of Pexels.