How the World Bank Left African Hospital Patients “Detained” and in Crushing Debt

This story was produced in partnership with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Jacob Njagi’s newborn son could barely breathe when he arrived in an ambulance at the emergency ward of an Avenue Group hospital in Nairobi, Kenya, in the early hours of the morning. It was June 2022—Covid-19 cases were surging—and Njagi and his family had spent hours searching for an available bed. When they finally pulled up to the hospital in Parklands—a leafy neighborhood that felt a million miles away from the poverty around their home on the edge of the city—Njagi was exhausted. His infant, Jason, was in peril, his lungs clogged. But Njagi said administrators at the hospital—which is backed by the International Finance Corp. (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group that works to relieve poverty—demanded a deposit. “We had to beg them to at least give us oxygen, because the oxygen in… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.