Recent African immigrants face enormous barriers to health care due to language challenges, their uninsured status and lack of familiarity with health care systems in the U.S.

The major health needs in the African immigrant community in New York City include primary prevention, screening and treatment of infectious disease, including tropical infectious diseases, OB/GYN care, screening for vision impairment and ocular disease, and blood pressure and diabetes screening and treatment.

African Services has aggressively sought to fill this gap in health care access, and by providing supportive services that address the social and economic factors affecting the most vulnerable African immigrants.

Barriers Faced by African Immigrants in Accessing Health Care

The health rights of immigrants are legally protected in New York City; however, many African immigrants do not know how to independently access centralized primary care or even localized public health clinic facilities, shy away from public services in general from fear of immigration authorities, and are largely uninsured or underinsured.

Learn more about the health rights of immigrants from The New York Immigration Coalition's publication, Access to Health Care for Uninsured Immigrants details the rights of uninsured immigrants in New York City.

Language is the primary barrier to effectively accessing healthcare for most African immigrants. Of nearly 10,000 newcomers African Services serves each, only 12 percent speak English fluently. Only a handful of healthcare providers have the capacity to serve African patients in French. Of the major non-European African languages spoken widely in the African communities of New York City Pulaar, Wolof, Mandingo, and Soninke are not spoken by medical or social work staff and are not available through the language bank in a single one of the fifteen New York City Health and Hospital Corporation hospitals nor in the ten NYC Department of Health STD or TB Clinics.

Beyond language facility, most healthcare providers are unfamiliar with the cultural context of African patients. African Services acts as a bridge between the African community and healthcare providers, and helps providers to improve their cultural competency in providing effective care to African patients. A shortage of peer health workers is also acute in the African immigrant community, which is often accustomed to the community health worker model in their countries of origin.

Chronic Disease and African Immigrants

There is an urgent need to increase awareness and access to early intervention services for non-communicable chronic disease affecting African immigrants. The incidence of chronic disease is extremely high amongst the African-born: the ratio of deaths from non-communicable disease to deaths from infectious and parasitic disease will be 1:1 for Africans by 2015 (WHO).

Chronic disease prevention and treatment is important for conditions which either disproportionately affect people of African descent, such as diabetes and high blood pressure, or in which people of African descent suffer from lack of screening and prevention services including cardiovascular disease and cancer.

African-Americans have prevalence rates of diabetes at a rate that is 70% higher than white Americans and lower survival rates for cancer due to late diagnosis (CDC). The status of recent immigrants of African origin is even more precarious--exacerbated by non-fluency in English and economic instability.