Kenya: 11,578 delivered in MSF's shipping container hospital

In January 2016, MSF started refurbishing Mrima Hospital. To ensure access to medical services until the new health centre was functional, MSF set up a temporary facility made from shipping containers, bound together to make a fully functional hospital complete with an operating theatre. The ‘Container Village’, as many came to refer to it, became a haven where many mothers could deliver their babies in safety, even with complicated pregnancies.

For the two years and a half that the shipping-container facility was operational, 11,578 deliveries were assisted in it.

Mombasa County Governor, Hassan Ali Joho (L) with OCG Kenya Head of Mission unveiling the plaque for the newly-expanded Mrima Health Centre in Likoni

A mother and her visitor admire a newborn baby in the newly extended Mrima Hospital in Likoni.

A nurse performs a check on the vitals of a mother who had delivered a few hours earlier in the new Mrima Hospital.

MSF Swiss Head of Mission, Stéphanie Giandonato giving a speech during the official opening of the newly expanded Mrima Hospital in Likoni.

One of the maternity wards inside the in the modified shipping-container facility in Likoni

Beds in the delivery room in the shipping-container facility in Likoni

Anaesthetist George Njenga examines a patient in the recovery room after a cesarean section in the shipping-container facility.

Gituma Marigu, a theatre midwife showing a newborn baby to the mother during a cesarean section.

Baraka, a midwife checking the vitals of newborn babies at the MSF facility in Likoni

A newborn baby at the Mrima Maternity Hospital

A newborn baby at the Mrima Maternity Hospital

Mothers sleeping in a tent-ward pitched outside the shipping-container-made hospital during the countrywide nurses' strike in Kenya. Many mothers had no other alternative facilities to deliver in and had to come to Mrima.

Surgical team performs a cesarean section to a mother in an operating theatre in the modified shipping container.

Ali Oketch, the MSF’s Operating Theatre Nurse Supervisor in Likoni.

Midwife Pamela Were in the newly opened Mrima faciity.

21-year-old Rosenta Adhiambo was the first patient to be admitted in the newly opened Mrima Maternuty Hospital.

Ndusya Peter, 40, holds her twins a day after giving birth in MSF’s modified shipping-container facility in Likoni

A newborn baby at the facility in Likoni

All Photos © Paul Odongo/MSF