A day-long medical camp at Buhuka Health Centre II, funded through the CNOOC-operated Kingfisher development, served more than a thousand fishing-community residents. LivingWellUganda visited to see what stays behind after the tents come down.
By Grace Nabirye..Kikuube District.5 min read
Kikuube District. 15 July 2025.
ProgressCommunity Health & Water
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.
Fisherwoman, Buhuka landing site
What outreach camps cannot replace
Field Dispatches
Get our weekly regional audits in your inbox
One email a week from the Kampala, Busia, Hoima and Jinja desks. What we checked, what we saw at the site, and what is still not adding up.
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, but 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.
The regulatory framing of oil-adjacent health spending
Uganda's petroleum revenue-sharing rules directs a portion of royalties to local governments in producing districts, intended partly to fund exactly this kind of health infrastructure through the ordinary district budget rather than through company-run camps. Kikuube district health officials say that revenue-sharing budget has been slow to translate into recurrent staffing at facilities like Buhuka Health Centre II, which is part of why a single-day outreach still draws the numbers it does.
CNOOC has said its Kingfisher community programme is intended to complement, not substitute for, government health spending. Has pointed to donated medicine stocks and equipment as evidence of a standing relationship with the health centre rather than a one-off gesture. District officials broadly confirm the donations but say they cannot yet point to a permanent additional staff post funded by the company.
"
A camp treats the people who can reach it on the day. A staffed clinic treats the ones who cannot wait for the next one.
Kikuube district health officer
The clearest marker of whether this kind of outreach becomes durable will be whether Buhuka Health Centre II shows up in next year's district health sector performance report with an expanded staffing establishment, rather than only in a company press release about the next one-day camp.
Evidence & documents
Every claim above is checked against the records below. Open each one to see where it comes from.
01Over 1,000 residents benefit from free medical camp in Kikuube district▾
Grace Nabirye investigates land, water and energy projects and how they land on households. She has long-running coverage of the Albertine oil region, including company jobs and community health programmes there, and of Kampala water supply.
