Digital Loans to Reach Healthcare Providers in Africa

Medical Credit Fund (MCF) Headquarters: The Netherlands
Project Countries: Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda
Keywords: digital lending, health small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) finance, financial inclusion, gender inclusion, universal health coverage (UHC)

Summary

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, private small and medium-sized health facilities (health SMEs) provide about 50% of healthcare services, including to the poor. Yet these healthcare providers are often excluded from bank financing, which typically entails collateral and lengthy processing that they cannot afford. As a result, health SMEs cannot grow or invest in their facilities to deliver quality care to the communities they serve.

Medical Credit Fund (MCF) closes this gap with loan products tailored to these markets: alongside its secured loan products, it has developed a digital loan product by leveraging the region's existing mobile money ecosystem. MCF's digital loans offer collateral-free, fast-disbursing financing built around health SMEs' cash-flow realities and have been pivotal in expanding access to finance. Since its 2017 Kenya launch, MCF has disbursed more than 10,000 digital loans worth over US$ 100 million, expanded into Tanzania, and grown the share of loans to women-led facilities from 18% to 33%.

The lesson: digital lending can reach health SMEs at scale, supporting gender inclusion and reaching small businesses not served through conventional finance, ultimately revitalizing primary care and advancing UHC.

Key Figures

US$ 200M Volume Disbursed to >2,500 Health SMEs across 5 African Countries

10,000+ Digital Loans Disbursed Worth > US$ 100M to >1,000 Health SMEs

18% (2017) to 33% (2026) Percentage of Loans Disbursed to Women-Led Facilities

Partner's Information

An NGO PharmAccess initiative, Medical Credit Fund (MCF) provides financing to healthcare providers where traditional banks hesitate. Across Africa, a persistent financing gap restricts investment and limits growth for health SMEs. MCF closes that gap with affordable tailored loans and technical assistance, helping facilities invest in equipment, improve quality of care and serve more patients, ensuring providers can invest in what their patients need most.

Background & Challenge

Private health SMEs like clinics, maternity homes, pharmacies or small diagnostic labs deliver roughly half of Sub-Saharan Africa's healthcare, yet remain locked out of bank financing that typically demands collateral and audited financials most don't have. Women, who make up two-thirds of the region's health workforce, face particular barriers. The result is chronic underinvestment: pharmacies that can't restock essential medicines, clinics that can't finance replacement equipment, and facilities that can't cover staff or rent while waiting for months on delayed insurance payments. MCF addresses this financing gap by introducing tailored loan products to health SMEs that would otherwise have no access to finance.

Approach

MCF tailors its lending products to how health SMEs actually operate. Its digital loan product, launched in Kenya in 2017, replaces collateral requirements and lengthy paperwork with alternative data, such as mobile money transaction history, to assess repayment capacity, disbursing funds within days and collecting small, automatic repayments tied to the facility's own cash inflows.

The product is purpose-flexible: pharmacies use it to restock medicines, clinics to replace diagnostic equipment, and other facilities to bridge delays in insurance reimbursement without interrupting care. By removing the manual cost of appraising hundreds of small loans, MCF reaches facilities that conventional banks consider too small or costly to serve, including women-led facilities, whose owners often lack the collateral or credit history traditional lenders require. The share of loans to women-led facilities has grown from 18% to 33% since 2017.

Having proven the model in Kenya, MCF began replicating it in Tanzania in 2025 with Vodacom, disbursing over 250 loans in under 1.5 years, showing the model works beyond its original market.

Impact & Results

MCF has disbursed more than 10,000 digital loans worth over US$ 100 million since its 2017 Kenya launch, reaching over 1,000 healthcare providers whose facilities each serve roughly 750 patients a month. Over half of these patients are from low-income communities, putting the product's reach squarely among the underserved patients it was designed for. The impact is visible at the facility level. At Wama Hospital, an MCF loan funded a new ambulance; the hospital, as Co-Director Dr. Richard Wangombe put it, "is only a phone call away from saving the life of a mother and their child." In another example, Josephine Suleiman of Olivelink Healthcare shows what sustained financing builds over time: through multiple MCF loans, her maternal health facility has grown from five to over twenty beds, now serving a far larger community than it could when it started.

Future Outlook

Having validated the model in Kenya and shown early traction in Tanzania, MCF's priority is replication of the same collateral-free, data-driven loan product to new markets, with an explicit aim to lend to women-led facilities. MCF is also studying which facility types and loan purposes drive the strongest gains in patient reach and quality of care, and adapting its products to serve more clients and needs, ensuring growth means real health outcomes, not just disbursement volume. Finally, MCF is exploring how AI can streamline lending.