Queen 'Mamohato Memorial Hospital PPP, and its termination
Lesotho's Ministry of Health replaced its national referral hospital through an 18-year partnership with the private Tsepong consortium, which opened the hospital and three filter clinics in 2010 and 2011 and handled 24,796 admissions in 2018; the government terminated the contract in 2021, about five years before its end date, and took over management in mid-2021.
24,796 admissions, admissions at the ppp-run national referral hospital, 2018. 5 years, years of the 18-year contract term cut by the 2021 termination, 2021. McGuire et al., Annals of Global Health (2024), study of the Queen 'Mamohato Memorial Hospital integrated network PPP, retrieved 2026-10-17.
The move, and what it needed
The Ministry of Health contracted a private consortium to build and run the national referral hospital and its clinics for a fixed fee against quality standards, then ended the contract in 2021 after a nurse strike and the consortium's dismissal of the strikers broke the relationship.
Preconditions
- A health budget able to carry a fixed, indexed unitary payment over 18 years
- A ministry able to monitor performance standards and enforce deductions
- Wage policy for public health workers that does not undercut the contract's staffing terms
Limits: The source is a peer-reviewed interview study, not a government or World Bank evaluation, and its volume figures come from the hospital itself for one year, 2018. The termination is given only as approximately five years before the contract end, so the second metric is a rounded figure. The record shows one hospital network, the country's single referral facility, so it bears on national delivery only because that facility is the top of the public referral system; it is not a programme of many projects. The source does not give the annual payment to the consortium or its share of the health budget, and that cost is the main reason a reviewer would call the partnership a failure of design before it was a failure of delivery. Admissions after the government takeover are not published at this URL, so the record cannot show whether service fell after the handover.