AU UN IST PHOTO: Tobin Jones
The Dr. Hawa Abdi General Hospital began as a one-room clinic, which opened in 1983. Since then, hundreds of thousands of displaced and vulnerable people have received free and equal medical care at the hospital.
Today, the Dr. Hawa Abdi General Hospital sits at the heart of Hope Village. The medical staff at the hospital run an operation that sees between 600 and 1,000 patients per month. The staff provide free medical care for both the population of the camp and the entire Lower Shabelle region.
The hospital has touched the lives of thousands more beyond this turbulent region. It has been central in the development of medical capacity throughout Somalia, playing a vital role training new medical staff, educating the general population about good health and championing innovative Somali-wide training programs.
The hospital runs above capacity continuously and is constantly seeking access to better equipment, training manuals, and more medication.
general services
- Inpatient Care: 400 beds
- Outpatient Capacity: 300 patients a day
- Pediatrics Care: 60 beds
- Deliver 20 babies per day
- Two functional Operating Theaters
- Operational Laboratory and Pharmacy
- Ambulatory Therapeutic Feeding Centre
- Maternity and Obstetrics services
- Gynaecological care
EMERGENCY CARE & TRAINING
- A Cholera Treatment Centre (CTC) to provide treatment and care for those most severely affected (80-100 available beds)
- Therapeutic Feeding Department for assisting severely malnourished children (82 beds)
- Education and access-to-medicine programs designed to reduce child and maternal mortality rates
- Specialist, web-based training for nurses, doctors, and midwives, in collaboration with Chatham University

Dr. Hawa Abdi seeing patients in the hospital she founded.Photo: Arthur Nazaryan, Delphin Films.
Goals
- Secure a steady supply of medicine to treat our patients
Procure adequate funding to pay for the salary of our dedicated medical team
Purchase essential medical equipment, such as X-ray and 3D ultrasound machine
Strengthen hospital statistics collection through training our staffers on health statistics
Equip our hospital to become a training facility