The African Development Bank will grant Uganda and Kenya $69.8 million to improve health facilities that deal with non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in the region.

Uganda will receive $46.5 million to improve the Uganda Cancer Institute (UCI) as part of a regional initiative to reduce the number of patients seeking treatment abroad. The Ugandan government will also invest $31 million in the project with the aim of turning UCI into a regional centre of excellence in cancer treatment.

Nairobi will get $23.3 million to revamp the Kidney Institute of Kenya. The Kenyan government will supplement AfDB’s grant with $15.5 million to improve infrastructure and train health workers.

Sebastian Okeke, principal country programme officer at AfDB in Uganda, said that some of the $77.5 million will go to UCI to purchase state-of-the-art infrastructure for diagnosing and treating cancer.

“The money will go a long way towards creating systems for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer across the country,” said Jackson Orem, the head of UCI.

He said that most Ugandan hospitals do not have the capacity to diagnose and treat cancer. This means that early diagnosis and treatment is difficult.

Patients

Currently, just over two per cent of the estimated 500,000 cancer patients in Uganda get treatment. And it is predicted that even more people will suffer from non-communicable diseases as the middle class in East Africa expands.

Mr Okeke said Kenya and Uganda will start implementing the projects at the beginning of 2015.

Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi, which according to Mr Okeke, have been slower than their counterparts in negotiating the amounts necessary to start their own regional centres of excellence, are likely to start in 2016. 

In an arrangement agreed on by EAC health ministers last month, Tanzania will host the Regional Heart Institute, Burundi will host the Regional Nutritional Sciences Institute and Rwanda the EAC Health, Vaccines and Immunisation Logistics Institute.

The World Bank has over the past three years been funding different regional centres of excellence for the development of agriculture. Uganda hosts the Cassava Regional Research Centre; Kenya hosts the Dairy Research Centre while the Rice research centre is being hosted by Tanzania.