Tanzanian billionaire Edha Nahdi gives $35 million to build 10 hospitals in Kenya

Ground was broken on Saturday, Sept. 12 on the first of ten mother and baby hospitals that Edha Nahdi's Amsons Group is funding across Kenya, in a programme the Tanzanian conglomerate is paying for with a $35 million grant rather than an investment.

President William Ruto laid the foundation stone for the Chebunyo Amsons Mother and Baby Hospital in Chepalungu, Bomet County, and announced the wider commitment. The money, about 4.5 billion shillings, will be spent under an initiative the group calls Mama na Mtoto Kwanza, Swahili for mother and child first.

A grant means the company expects nothing back.

The Chebunyo facility will be a Level 4 hospital with between 200 and 250 beds, providing antenatal and maternity care, obstetric intensive care, postnatal and newborn services, neonatal intensive care, and dedicated maternity and neonatal theatres. Ruto said it should be finished within six months and commissioned by March 2027.

He set out the case for it in numbers. About sixteen Kenyan women die every day from causes related to pregnancy. Fewer than half the country's health facilities provide maternity services at all, and only about a third can handle emergency obstetric care. Kenya has roughly twelve hospital beds for every 10,000 people against a World Health Organization recommendation of at least 25, and its Level 4 hospitals hold 6,231 beds against an estimated requirement of 18,900. Twenty-six of the 47 counties account for about 60% of all maternal and neonatal deaths.

Ruto said the partnership showed how enterprise and social responsibility could work together, and that no woman should lose her life while giving life.

The man behind it has spent two years buying Kenyan industry.

Nahdi runs Amsons Group, a family conglomerate founded in 2008 and owned by the family of Abdalla Nahdi. It began as a Tanzanian oil importer and now spans fuel, liquefied petroleum gas, transport, cement, real estate, inland container depots, bulk grain storage and wheat milling. Its Tanzanian cement brands are Camel and Tembo, and it bought 65% of Holcim's Mbeya Cement operation before looking north.

Kenya came next and came expensively. Amsons acquired Bamburi Cement, the country's largest producer, in December 2024 for 23.6 billion shillings, about $181.5 million, through its Kenyan subsidiary with backing from KCB Group, after a bidding war with Savannah Clinker and a 96% shareholder endorsement. It then built a position in East African Portland Cement, taking 68.7% directly.

Between the two, Nahdi now has effective influence over roughly 31% of Kenya's cement production capacity.

The bets have started paying. Bamburi lost 905 million shillings in 2024, largely on foreign exchange losses tied to selling its Ugandan subsidiary, then turned a net profit of 3.08 billion shillings, about $23.7 million, for the year to December 2025.

More is planned. Amsons has outlined a $380 million second phase at Bamburi and a $250 million clinker plant at Matuga in Kwale County, and the group was in advanced talks in May to buy the fuel distributor Oryx Energies for $250 million. Nahdi has said he wants to be among the leading cement manufacturers in both Kenya and Tanzania by 2030.

What $35 million in hospitals buys is standing in a country where he is now one of the largest foreign industrial owners, and where the question of who benefits from that ownership is live.

Nahdi met Ruto at State House in Nairobi last year to discuss the Bamburi expansion.