Goderich, Freetown — September 14, 2026.
For years, families in Goderich, Oba Funkia Community, knew the routine: a long wait, a single delivery bed, and often a rushed trip across town when their only Community Health Centre simply couldn’t keep up. On Monday, that routine ended.
The Ministry of Health, in partnership with the World Bank, officially reopened the newly rehabilitated Goderich Community Health Centre, transformed from a facility with only five inpatient beds into one with twenty. Before, the facility only had one delivery bed, which has now increased to six— enough to safely support up to 200 births a month, nearly five times the old capacity.
“No woman should give birth at home when a facility like this is right at your doorstep,” the Minister of Health, Dr. Austin Demby told a jubilant crowd of community people, development partners and ministry officials gathered for the commissioning. The changes go beyond the maternity ward. A new Under five unit means sick children no longer have to be moved elsewhere for basic care. A modern lab— with equipment for blood and imaging tests that once meant a costly trip to the city — now sits down the hall. The complete rehabilitation now means that the facility has doubled water security with a 20,000-liter water tank, plus a back up to the national electricity grid with a 20 KVA clean solar energy—all of which keep the centre running through outages that used to interrupt everything from vaccine storage to nighttime deliveries.
For health workers who will staff the facility, the Minister had a simple ask: treat the new equipment “as if it were your own.” For the community, an equally direct one — to protect the facility and use it wisely.
