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Balmer Healthcare Limited, a company founded by Kenyan businessman David Langat, and India's Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Ltd plan to build a $200 million tertiary hospital in Eldoret, one of the most ambitious private healthcare investments announced in Kenya in recent years and one explicitly aimed at reducing the number of patients who leave the country for treatment they cannot find at home.
The investment was announced at the Fourth Kenya International Investment Conference in Nairobi, where Balmer Healthcare chief executive Koima Langat said the facility would bring world-class medical services closer to Kenyan patients.
The hospital is expected to cover more than 20 specialties and serve patients from across Kenya. The structure of the partnership divides responsibilities clearly. Balmer will build the hospital. Apollo will provide specialist expertise, brand credibility and operational management.
Dinesh Madhavan, president for group oncology and international business at Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Ltd, said the group operates more than 75 hospitals across India and wants to bring its model of personalized, specialist care closer to Kenyan patients. Apollo is already a familiar name in Kenya. It is one of the most common destinations for Kenyan patients who travel to India for cardiac procedures, cancer treatment and other complex care they cannot easily access domestically. By bringing Apollo into a Kenyan facility, Balmer is effectively trying to move the destination rather than the patient.
That framing sits at the center of the project's commercial and social rationale. Kenya loses a significant volume of medical spending every year to outbound healthcare tourism. Patients who can afford advanced treatment often choose India, South Africa or other destinations when the procedures they need are not reliably available locally. A well-equipped, Apollo-branded tertiary facility in Eldoret would offer at least some of those patients a domestic option, keeping both the patient and the spending within Kenya.
Eldoret is an important choice of location. Most large private healthcare investments in Kenya gravitate toward Nairobi. Placing a major tertiary hospital in Eldoret, a regional hub in the Rift Valley, expands the geographic reach of advanced care for patients in western Kenya and creates potential for cross-border patient referrals from neighboring countries.
The partnership between Balmer and Apollo has been developing for some time. The memorandum of understanding was signed in 2022 by Madhavan on behalf of Apollo and David Langat, chairman of Balmer Healthcare. The rollout is designed in four phases: technical consulting and strategic planning, then project management and monitoring, then commissioning, and finally brand operations management.
David Langat is the founder of DL Group, a Kenyan conglomerate with significant interests in agriculture and real estate.
