A third free clinic for Onosa, Lagos, after 11,195 patients treated at our first two

Our first clinics went up the same way. A community partner donates an unused space, we fund the renovation to Lagos State standards, and two registered nurses staff it Monday to Friday with volunteer doctors on rota.

Both clinics are still open and have treated 11,195 patients between them. That is cumulative, from Safe City opening in December 2024 and Care Circle in October 2025:

They reach the people they were built for. At Safe City, our first clinic, patients support families on about $11.60 (£9) per person per month. At Care Circle the average is $4.90 (£4), supporting a household of four. Malaria and hypertension are the two most common conditions at both sites, exactly the preventable, treatable things that turn fatal when care is out of reach.

Malaria and hypertension are what most people come in with. Both are cheap to treat early and dangerous when left, and these were the conditions treated at Safe City in May:

They cost very little to run. Safe City cost $416 (about £330) to operate in May. Care Circle cost $402 (about £320). That is a functioning clinic, medications included, for roughly $13 a day.

A clinic visit costs $1.33. Both clinics landed on the same figure in May, independently of each other:

They stretch further than we budget for. Care Circle's funding was meant to cover six months and lasted nine, to May 2026, because community contributions and the clinic's plastic recycling programme covered the gap. In those extra three months it served over 2,000 people.

A healthcare worker in light blue scrubs examining a young boy seated in a chair at the Oworoshoki clinic, observed by a colleague

Why a third clinic

Tolani, our local partner in Lagos, assessed Onosa in November 2025. Residents told the local team they had lost neighbours to avoidable deaths, because people wait until an illness is serious enough to justify the cost and the journey.

A waterlogged sand road through Onosa, lined with single-storey shopfronts and a two-storey building

A leader at the church that donated the space put it plainly:

We've lost a mother in our community because by the time she got to a hospital, her hypertension was already fatal, and she didn't even know she had high blood pressure.

The community, the partner and the building were all vetted in that assessment. The space is an unused restroom and storage area, it meets Lagos State size requirements for a primary healthcare clinic, and the structure was found sound enough that renovations would be minimal, on a par with the first two clinics we constructed.

Inside the donated space, half-tiled walls and unfinished blockwork under a corrugated roof

What this funding will do

The build is managed locally by Tolani and her team, who run both existing clinics day to day.

The asset

What this leaves behind is a permanent primary healthcare clinic in Onosa, on the outskirts of Lagos State, renovated to Lagos State standards inside a donated community building.

It is a permanent building, and both our earlier clinics, from 2024 and 2025, are still operating. Over time it should be carried by community contributions and a plastic recycling programme, as at those two, though neither is in place in Onosa yet.

A permanent clinic takes Onosa from one morning a week to five days. Today a volunteer outreach runs from a table, and the medications run out before the queue does:

In June, AHA Initiative (Tolani's team) shared five routes they want to test for covering running costs without grant funding.

The three most likely are Lagos State health insurance reimbursement (LASHMA), nurses and physicians supplied by the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), and gradual community ownership with local fundraising. LASHMA would in principle cover the full cost, but it is the slowest to come through. The NYSC route would cover about 40%, and community ownership up to 60%.

These are routes they intend to test, not commitments. We are funding Onosa's first year on the assumption that none of them come through. If any do, the clinic needs us less.

One mechanism is already working: the plastic recycling programme at Care Circle, our second clinic, turns neighbourhood waste into cash for operations.