Healthcare workers across Ethiopia launched unprecedented strikes in 2025, bringing an already fragile system to its knees. Beginning mid-May, over 15 ,000 doctors, nurses and other health workers across the country conducted a strike to protest chronic low wages and deteriorating working conditions. By late May, the strikes had spread nationwide, paralysing whatever was left of the public hospitals and clinics.
Since the collapse of the Somali state in the 1990s, the country's private sector has played a particularly prominent role in service delivery, flourishing in the cracks left by the absence of a central government. In this space of the ungoverned economy, those providing essential utilities — such as healthcare — were assumed by businesses and economic cartels, which have reaped immense profits in turn amid the vacuum. However, in the years since, as the state-building process has gradually attempted to deliver or centralise such services, the incestuous relationships between business cartels and rent-seeking politicians have persisted. And in the meantime, the fractured and uneven nature of healthcare providers in Somalia continues to pose severe dangers to the population.