Household Budget vs Healthcare Cost
In Kinshasa, a single episode of outpatient care costs roughly what a person has to live on for an entire month and 87% of that bill is medicines and procedures. This is the arithmetic that makes people stay home and treat themselves instead.
What your gift covers
The consultation
The first visit, and every follow-up it leads to. Care that stops after one appointment because the money ran out isn’t treatment, it’s an interruption. CCF funds the full course.
Diagnostics that end the guessing
Bloodwork, malaria and TB testing, ultrasound, imaging. Without them, clinicians treat symptoms blind and families pay twice, once for the wrong medicine, again for the right one.
Treatment and medicines
Prescriptions filled, surgeries performed, chronic conditions managed month after month. Medicines and procedures are the bulk of what families are billed, and the first thing they skip.
Emergencies, with no pause at the door
Accidents, obstetric crises, sudden severe illness. CCF’s standing agreements with partner facilities mean treatment starts on arrival and the invoice comes to us, not to a family that cannot pay it.
Dignity, not charity theatre
Patients are registered, treated and discharged like anyone else. No public sorting of who can pay. No one detained on a ward until relatives raise the balance.
The numbers
5.3M – people internally displaced inside the DRC; 87% of it caused by conflic
Families displaced by war
They arrive having left behind the house, the land, the stall, the tools; every asset a family would normally sell to pay for a hospital bill. What they carry instead is the health cost of the journey: untreated wounds, infections, pregnancies that went without care, children who missed every vaccination.
And most of them are invisible to the aid that follows camps. Around 87% of displaced people in the DRC live with host families rather than in managed sites, absorbed into neighbourhoods that were already stretched. Two households now live on one household’s income and both go without care.
Displacement is not only an eastern problem. Conflict in the western provinces, including Kinshasa, displaced an estimated 246,000 people in 2025, and humanitarian tracking has identified hundreds of thousands of displaced people in and around the capital.
~10.5M – people living with a disability in the DRC; roughly 15% of the population
People living with disabilities
They need health care more often than anyone and can afford it least. Assessments of disability in the DRC have found the overwhelming majority of disabled adults out of work and living in poverty, in a country where the leading causes of disability (polio, leprosy, war injuries, birth complications, untreated obstetric emergencies) are themselves the products of health care that came too late.
Congolese law already grants people with disabilities a right to free health care. In a system funded at the cashier’s window, that right has no money behind it. CCF is the money behind it.
Cost is compounded by access: a wheelchair user or a blind patient often cannot reach a clinic on foot in a city where most people walk to care, and must pay for transport and for someone to accompany them before a single fee is charged.
98.4% of surveyed Kinshasa households have no health insurance of any kind
Single mothers
A woman raising children alone pays for care twice. Once at the window, in cash, on the day. And again in the day’s earnings she loses by closing the stall, missing the shift or leaving the market to sit in a waiting room; income no one else in the household replaces.
So she triages her own family. The child’s fever gets seen; her own symptoms wait, sometimes for years. Research across the region finds disability and chronic illness concentrated in female-headed households and among women who are widowed or separated; the accumulated cost of care deferred because someone else needed it more.
Covering the bill is what lets a mother seek care for herself, not only for her children and what stops one illness from ending a family’s only income.
26.7%
of pregnant women screened for high blood pressure in Kinshasa antenatal clinics
Hypertensive disorders caused nearly a quarter of the maternal deaths recorded by the DRC’s own surveillance system. Three in four women are never checked for the condition that may kill them.
Published research on facility readiness and provider knowledge in Kinshasa
How it works
From the door to the discharge, without a bill in the way.
1
A patient arrives at a partner facility
CCF works through clinics and hospitals already serving the community, under a standing agreement; not through parallel structures that disappear when funding does.
2
Eligibility is confirmed quietly
Verification happens at registration, in the same queue as everyone else. No public means-testing, no separate waiting area.
3
Care proceeds on clinical need alone
Consultation, diagnostics, treatment, admission if required. The clinician decides what’s necessary; cost doesn’t enter the room.
4
CCF settles directly with the facility
The invoice comes to us against agreed rates. The patient never handles the transaction, and the facility isn’t left absorbing unrecoverable debt.
5
Follow-up is funded too
Return visits, repeat tests, ongoing medication for chronic conditions. Coverage tracks the illness, not the calendar.
Choose what you want to cover
Monthly gifts are what let us guarantee a facility that the fund will be there. The commitment that turns emergency relief into reliable access.
One consultation and tests
A full outpatient episode for one person; the visit, the diagnostics and the medicines. Roughly a month’s income for the family you’re covering.
$100
A family's care for a year
Ongoing access for one household: routine visits, chronic medication and the emergency that would otherwise wipe out their savings.
$200
An emergency fund at one clinic
A standing balance at a partner facility so critical cases are treated on arrival, before anyone asks who is paying.
$175
Data Sources & References
- Diango K, Yangongo J, Sistenich V, Hodkinson P, Mafuta E, Wallis L. Evaluation of needs and supply of emergency care in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo: a cross-sectional household survey. BMJ Open, 2022.
- Experiences of Healthcare Providers and Households Facing Healthcare Costs in the DR Congo: a qualitative analysis. ClinicoEconomics and Outcomes Research, 2026 — outpatient cost in Kinshasa, insurance coverage, catastrophic spending, equipment and stockouts, patient confinement for unpaid bills.
- Assessing out-of-pocket expenditures for primary health care in the Democratic Republic of Congo. BMC Health Services Research, 2018 — household share of health financing.
- Assessment of the medical equipment supply chain in the Democratic Republic of Congo: a qualitative methods study. BMC Health Services Research — procurement gaps in unsupported Kinshasa health zones.
- USAID, Democratic Republic of the Congo health fact sheet — population with little or no access to health care.
- World Bank poverty estimates for the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
- Exemplars in Global Health, Democratic Republic of the Congo — distribution of facilities and providers.
- IOM Displacement Tracking Matrix, DR Congo baseline assessment — numbers of internally displaced people, causes of displacement, and the share living with host families rather than in managed sites.
- IOM Democratic Republic of the Congo Crisis Response Plan — displacement in the western provinces, including Kinshasa.
- Country primer on disability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — disability prevalence, employment and poverty among people with disabilities, and the national framework granting a right to free health care.
- Socioeconomic and national disparities in disability distribution across East African countries. International Journal for Equity in Health — disability concentrated among female-headed households and widowed or separated individuals.