The road down the escarpment from Kyangwali to Buhuka is steep, dusty and, in the rainy season, almost impassable. For the fishing families at the bottom of it - the villages that hug the Ugandan shore of Lake Albert - a specialist doctor is rarely closer than a full day away. On 8 July 2025, more than a thousand of those residents did not have to travel at all.
The Cooperator News reported that a free medical camp at Buhuka Health Centre II, funded through the China National Offshore Oil Corporation's Kingfisher community investment programme and staffed by Ugandan clinicians, offered general consultation, antenatal care, HIV testing, immunisations and non-communicable-disease screening in a single day.
What the day delivered
The camp is small when measured against the scale of the Kingfisher oil development, but it is not nothing. Blood-pressure readings caught a cluster of previously undiagnosed hypertensive patients. Antenatal visits picked up two high-risk pregnancies now referred to Kikuube district hospital. A supply of essential medicines was donated to the health centre to see it through the next quarter.
I have not seen a doctor in two years. Today I saw one and I brought my mother. That is a good day.
What outreach camps cannot replace
LivingWellUganda's separate reporting on the Kingfisher project has documented serious community allegations of forced evictions and heavy militarisation around the wider concession. A day of free consultations does not answer those charges. It does, however, matter to the people who walked to it. The honest measure of any oil-adjacent healthcare programme is whether the health post it leaves behind is still stocked, staffed and open twelve months later. That is the visit we will make.
- Over 1,000 residents benefit from free medical camp in Kikuube district - The Cooperator News
- CNOOC enhances livelihoods, donates to health centres and schools - The Cooperator News
