Access Afya: Bringing high-quality care closer to home and within reach

Outside a Curafa clinic in Kiambu, just north of Nairobi in Kenya, care is already underway.

At a small table beside the clinic, a community health worker wraps a blood-pressure cuff around a patient's arm while another colleague records information nearby. A few chairs, basic diagnostic equipment and the clinic itself are all within reach. It is a familiar primary-care setting: close to where people live and focused on everyday health needs and screening.

Inside another Curafa clinic, part of Access Afya’s network of community-based primary care clinics, a healthcare professional examines a young child while a caregiver watches closely. These are the kinds of encounters Access Afya was built around: routine checks, questions that need answering, and care that people can access without travelling far or facing costs they cannot manage.

Access Afya – afya means health in Swahili – was founded with this reality in mind. In many communities, seeking care depends on practical considerations: how far the clinic is, what the visit will cost and whether people trust the care they will receive.When Philips Foundation invested in Access Afya in 2023, founder Melissa Menke described the people the organization was trying to serve in straightforward terms: "think of the hardworking individual, trying to make ends meet in Nairobi's informal sectors. They choose our clinics and services because they yearn for quality health, even on a tight budget.

"That need remains central to Access Afya's work. Since then, the organization has expanded its Curafa franchise network, a model of locally operated primary-care clinics supported by Access Afya’s systems, training and operational support, to 24 active clinics across nine counties in Kenya, serving urban, peri-urban and rural communities. Across its services, Access Afya has now surpassed 800,000 cumulative health visits.

The model has matured with that growth. Access Afya is now focused on expanding a system that can keep care accessible, affordable and consistent while giving local healthcare professionals a stronger role in delivering it.

The challenges facing the communities Access Afya serves are part of a wider transition in Kenya’s healthcare system. The country has made progress towards universal health coverage, but essential health service coverage remains at 53 on the World Health Organization’s UHC Service Coverage Index, while out-of-pocket payments still account for 24.2% of total health expenditure [1].

From clinics to a franchise model

When Access Afya was founded in 2012, the organization began by operating clinics directly. The aim was to build a dependable model of primary care for communities where quality services were often difficult to access or afford.

As the organization grew, that model began to evolve. The franchise approach gave local healthcare professionals the opportunity to run Curafa clinics within a standardized system.

Dr. Daphne Ngunjiri, now CEO of Access Afya, has helped lead that transition. When Philips Foundation spoke with her, she described the model as healthcare worker-centric: local professionals bring an intimate understanding of their communities, while Access Afya provides the systems, training and support needed to run a clinic.

That approach has now moved from concept into practice. 18 franchisees have been financed and launched, while more than 470 qualified healthcare professionals are in the pipeline to open clinics of their own. Access Afya supports them with clinic setup, digital systems, procurement, insurance relationships, training and operational guidance and creating a common structure across locations while keeping care locally led.

The early performance of the network suggests that this model can support both access and local ownership. As of mid-2026, 80% of franchisees maintained on-time loan repayments, while the portfolio at risk after 90 days stood at 5%. For Access Afya, these are important indicators because the sustainability of each clinic depends on its ability to serve patients well while operating as a viable local healthcare business.

The experience has also sharpened the organization’s view of what scaling primary care requires. Growth depends on more than finding new locations. It requires trained operators, consistent quality standards, reliable systems and enough capital to help qualified healthcare professionals establish clinics in the communities where they are needed.

That challenge has shaped the way Access Afya thinks about financing. A new Curafa clinic requires a new setup in capital, an amount that can be difficult for an individual healthcare professional to raise. Access Afya has therefore developed a fit-for-purpose financing structure that combines capital for clinic setup with repayment from clinic revenues over time.

Its next phase builds further on this through a blended franchise financing facility, bringing together equity, impact debt and catalytic first-loss grant funding, while mobilizing additional growth capital to support the network’s continued expansion.

Recognizing what works

Access Afya's financing journey has involved several philanthropic and impact-investment partners. We Share Forward Foundation, Bayer Foundation and World Diabetes Foundation also supported the organization through a grant model, designed to keep philanthropic capital in circulation as ventures grow. Philips Foundation subsequently supported Access Afya through impact investment, providing capital for a model that had already demonstrated its potential to scale. 

This progression reflects Philips Foundation’s approach to impact investing: different stages of healthcare innovation require different types of capital. Early philanthropic funding can help test, refine and de-risk an approach, while impact investment can support proven models with the operational readiness and potential for sustainable growth. By working across this continuum of capital, Philips Foundation helps promising healthcare solutions move beyond the pilot stage, scale sustainably and become embedded within real health systems.

Access Afya provides a practical example of how that transition can work. Behind the growth figures are families seeking care close to home, healthcare professionals building trusted relationships in their communities and children receiving attention before small health concerns become bigger ones. Making that possible at scale has required strong local operators, reliable systems, insurance partnerships and financing that can support further growth. For Access Afya, success ultimately comes down to whether more families can access high-quality care, close to home and within their means.