Morogoro, Tanzania
St. Anna Clinic Ends Its Oxygen Shortages
14 February 2026
- 300+
- Patients served monthly
- 24/7
- Supply availability
- 45%
- Cost reduction vs. trucked supply
A rural clinic that once rationed oxygen between wards now holds a week of reserve supply, delivered on a standing schedule from our regional filling station.
“We used to make impossible choices about who received oxygen overnight. Since the standing deliveries began, that conversation has simply disappeared from this clinic.”
St. Anna Clinic serves a catchment of farming villages outside Morogoro: maternity, paediatrics, and a small inpatient ward. For years its oxygen supply arrived by truck from Dar es Salaam, on a schedule that bent to traffic, fuel prices, and luck.
Rationing by timetable
Staff describe the old reality plainly: cylinders were budgeted like medicine. A difficult birth and a pneumonia admission on the same night meant arithmetic no clinician should have to do. Orders placed on Monday arrived Thursday, or the following Monday.
The new supply line
St. Anna now receives medical oxygen on a standing weekly schedule from Tanzania Kwanza's regional filling operation, with emergency top-ups available same-day. The clinic holds a rolling reserve of a full week's consumption, more buffer than it has ever had.
Local production cut the delivered price by roughly 45% compared with long-haul trucked supply. The clinic redirected the savings into pulse oximeters for both wards.
Beyond one clinic
More than 300 patients a month pass through St. Anna, and none of them will ever know about the supply chain working behind their treatment, which is exactly the point. Reliable oxygen is invisible infrastructure. We are building it region by region, clinic by clinic.
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