The Opening of a Chinese-Built Hospital in Niamey, Niger

• In Event: Global Medicine from the South? Emerging Markets and Indian Ocean Medical Worlds - II

Abstract

As part of its ancient, but recently intensified presence in the field of health care in Africa, China is building dozens of hospitals across the continent. In Niger, Chinese stakeholders have funded, built and partly operate the Hôpital Général de Référence, opened in Niamey in 2017. This hospital allows for the concretization of a Nigerian national project: to be able to treat “at home” medical conditions that previously required expensive “sanitary evacuations,” primarily toward northern Africa and western Europe. China’s cooperation is responsible for creating an unprecedented fourth level of the pyramid in the health system. This new, giant infrastructure profoundly changes the suburban non-urbanized neighborhood in which it has been edified. Drawing upon preliminary fieldwork conducted in Niger, this paper will examine challenges, concerns and uncertainties produced by the hospital. Special attention will be given to its staffing and maintenance over the long term, given how the hospital punctures into the national health workforce and relies on medical missions from coming abroad (Morocco, Saudi Arabia, India, China) to perform surgical procedures on preselected patients. I will wonder what kind of medical space is created by this new infrastructure: public or private, opened (patients and medical missions coming from far) or closed (militarized, under surveillance)? I will discuss the notion of enclave as this hospital creates a globalized, de-territorialized medical space. More broadly, I will approach the hospital as an infrastructure which is both produced by practices and structuring socio-technical networks within the healthcare system, the city and the state.

Author

• Fanny Chabrol, Centre Population & Développement, IRD