Ebony Clinic: Quality healthcare for South Africans with GroFin’s support
With an overwhelming majority of the population at 97.6% consisting of native South Africans, and only half the households having access to piped water, Kaalfontein in Johannesburg is a typical township that is struggling to cater for a high BoP population.
While townships are economically and politically significant in South Africa, they continue to lurk on the margins of neighbouring urban core economies, unable to attract much-needed private investment for essential services such as healthcare.
Kaalfontein found the answer to its prayers in Thabo Lewatle, an established entrepreneur with sound experience in managing peri-urban health clinics in South Africa, who founded Ebony Clinic in Kaalfontein in 2010.
Having run Ebony Clinic successfully for the last 6 years, Thabo wished to reach out to the community with a best-in-class maternity ward. With 31.7% of households in Kaalfontein being headed by females, the importance of maternal care cannot be emphasised enough.
By early 2016, having worked hard on getting the complex maternity building plans approved by the concerned authorities and committed considerable own capital towards the construction of a new maternity ward, Thabo needed a dedicated partner to provide the start-up expenses and initial working capital for the maternity ward’s operation.
“GroFin provided both finance and support to make the maternity ward operational and help me realise my vision of providing affordable healthcare to expecting mothers in my community,” says Thabo.
On business support, the GroFin South Africa team identified areas of assistance on the occupational health and safety (OH&S), succession planning as well as administrative fronts.
Being a healthcare facility, the maternity ward poses significant risks such as exposure to infection, disease, hazardous materials and waste for both patients and staff. GroFin is helping the entrepreneur implement a more robust OH&S plan. On the succession planning front, it was identified that a General Practitioner License is required in place of the current clinic license, with the team set to support the entrepreneur with placing either of the two other licensed doctors on the payroll as a license holder for the maternity ward. Finally, Medical Claim administration processes have also been identified as a business support area, since claims administration was so far being done by untrained staff. Based on GroFin’s assistance, a supervisor has been appointed and the Medical Claims software has also been upgraded.
With GroFin’s finance and support, Ebony Clinic reaches out to 19,000 patients each year and employs 15 members from the local community, sustaining multiple livelihoods in the Kaalfontein township.
