In the digital age, hundreds of patients are always refused or delayed in Hospitals in Senegal for lack of being able to pay in cash. The refusal to accept modern means like Wave or Orange Money costs lives. It is time to adapt our health system to the reality on the ground.
You have to have spent one night in a public hospital to measure the extent of the sinking. Decrepted buildings, essential drugs absent, single caregivers, overwhelmed, angry … and patients who often have only prayer for first -line treatment.
In Senegal, the health system is standing not by the means of the state, but by faith, the resilience and the sacrifice of its staff. Every night, doctors, nurses, midwives turn into a logistician, emergency artist, psychologist and sometimes in a fortune banker. And they save. Per miracle.
We say thank you. You are the fragile dike between hope and mourning.
And yet, this country has more than 900 billion CFA F CFA in 2024. Where do these billions go, when in Podor, there is still no gynecologist in the health district? When is the ultrasounder broken down or obsolete? When pregnant women have to travel 80 kilometers to Ndioum, sometimes at night, on smashed roads, without assurance of arriving alive?
At the national level, the situation is just as alarming:
Senegal has an average of 7 doctors per 100,000 inhabitants (WHO recommends at least 23).
Almost 70 % of district maternities have no neonatal resuscitation.
More than 40 % of health structures have no functional ambulance.
It is no longer a deficiency. It is a crime organized by inaction.
While Senegal gets bogged down in administrative slowness and dilapidated infrastructure:
Rwanda uses drones to deliver drugs and blood in rural areas.
Ghana has launched a digital emergency care financing program via electronic portfolios.
Mauritania has computerized all of its regional hospitals with an alert system on critical breakdowns.
And we, in Senegal? Our hospital pharmacies still refuse payments by Wave or Orange Money. Our hospitals run on emotional credit. And our reforms arrive after the burials.
It would be unfair to draw this dark painting without underline the islets of excellence that still remain. At Ndioum hospital, medical teams show a remarkable commitment. Midwives, doctors and nursing staff have established a reinforced guard system, a rigorous internal organization and a culture of solidarity between services.
Even with limited means, they provide secure deliveries, urgent interventions and supervised transfers, under often extreme conditions. Their rigor, their responsiveness and their sense of duty should be studied, valued, and generalized in all hospitals in the country.
-It is this ability to save lives with little that deserves to be greeted and supported, no longer as a feat, but as a standard.
I am addressing you, Minister of Health. I speak on behalf of Podor, but it is the cry of all of Rural Senegal.
In Podor:
No gynecologist for years.
No functional ultrasounder in several health stations.
Women transferred under distress in Ndioum, for lack of basic care.
Heroic midwives who give birth under torch lamps, when there is a bulb.
An ambulance that falls more often than it runs than it rolls.
Is this what a mother is worth a life? Is this your fair health policy?
We ask you, Minister:
1. To provide each district, including Podor, with a resident gynecologist.
2. To replace and maintain vital equipment (ultrasounds, ambulances, respirators).
3. To authorize and secure electronic payments in all structures.
4. To recruit the hundreds of medical unemployment.
5. To make health a national emergency and not a discourse section.
Because there can be no emergence without living hospitals. There can be no dignity without access to care. There can be no peace without health justice.
Sheikh Ahmed Tidiane Ly
Development actor – Department of Podor
Citizen standing in the face of the silent collapse of the Senegalese health system
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