C-Care adds Kampala women’s hospital to its Uganda network
Roswell Hospital, a 30-bed fertility and maternity centre in central Kampala, joins a Mauritian-owned group that now runs six hospitals across Uganda.
By
Kwame Asante
In brief
- C-Care completed its purchase of Roswell Hospital in Kampala on September 8.
- Neither the price nor the size of the stake acquired has been disclosed.
- Roswell treats more than 30,000 patients a year, focusing on women’s and maternal care.
- C-Care is controlled by Mauritius’s Dalais family through the listed conglomerate CIEL Ltd.
C-Care, the hospital group owned through Mauritius’s CIEL Ltd., has taken over Roswell Hospital in Kampala, lifting its Ugandan footprint to six hospitals and 17 clinics.
A specialist hospital in the capital’s business district
Roswell is a 30-bed facility located in Kampala’s central business district. Its caseload exceeds 30,000 patients each year, and its services centre on women’s health, care for mothers and children, gynaecology and fertility treatment. C-Care announced the closing on a Thursday, explaining that the transaction had been completed on September 8, as reported by Billionaires.Africa. The company kept both the purchase price and the proportion of Roswell it now holds to itself.
Hélène Echevin, who leads C-Care International, attended the signing alongside Malik Ssempebwa, the physician who founded Roswell. For the group’s East African arm, the appeal lies in specialisation.
“We are pleased to welcome Roswell Hospital into the C-Care family,”
Azhar Sundhoo, chief executive officer of C-Care East Africa
Sundhoo added that the purchase “strengthens our presence in Kampala and adds to our capabilities in women’s health, maternal and child care, and fertility.” What changes on the ground, according to C-Care, is integration: Roswell is to be absorbed into the broader network, resources are to be pooled across facilities, and the hospital’s medical equipment is to be upgraded.
How Roswell fits the Ugandan network
The new acquisition joins a group that has been converting smaller sites into full hospitals over recent months, and which marked three decades of operations in Uganda this year.
| Facility or plan | What C-Care reports |
|---|---|
| C-Care IHK (former International Hospital Kampala) | First private hospital in Uganda to perform both open-heart and keyhole surgery |
| Gulu | Outpatient centre turned into a 45-bed inpatient hospital in June |
| Mukono and Mbale | Upgraded to full hospitals |
| Kenya and Rwanda | Announced as targets for expansion |
The money behind the expansion
CIEL’s involvement began in 2015, when it joined India’s Fortis in a consortium that acquired 40% of International Medical Group, the operator of International Hospital Kampala, from Kibo Capital Partners. The business, founded by doctor Ian Clarke, was rebranded C-Care in 2022.
Since then the Mauritian conglomerate has tightened its grip. Its earnings release for the nine months to March shows how far, and how the healthcare unit performed over the same period.
CIEL attributed that growth to busier facilities and more patients in Mauritius and Uganda, together with better results from its laboratory business.
A Mauritian conglomerate run by one family
Healthcare is one of six businesses within CIEL, which employs more than 37,000 people across Africa and Asia. Its trajectory spans more than a century:
- A sugar estate is bought in Mauritius, the group’s starting point.
- The group moves into textiles.
- Expansion beyond Mauritius begins.
- Guillaume Dalais becomes group chief executive.
- Jean-Pierre Dalais, group CEO from 2017 to June 2024, becomes chairman.
CIEL trades on the Stock Exchange of Mauritius, where its market value stood at 13.4 billion rupees ($290.1 million) at the end of March. In a February ranking limited to listed holdings, Billionaires.Africa put Guillaume Dalais’s 8.4% stake at $26 million and Jean-Pierre Dalais’s 5.78% stake at $18.2 million.
Photo: MART PRODUCTION / Pexels
