Egbe, nestled among the hills along the Ilorin-Lokoja road, holds a very special place in my heart.
I first saw those hills in September 1976, as a precocious ten-year-old newly admitted to Titcombe College. I was fighting back the dark forebodings of a child suddenly living far away from home, in a boarding house among strangers.
Titcombe College, founded by missionaries of Serving In Mission (SIM), later ECWA (Evangelical Church Winning All), was then one of the few schools in what was Kwara State, now Kogi State, with access to excellent educational facilities. It also had something else that gave us comfort: the ECWA Hospital Egbe, located just across one of the school’s main gates.
The hospital, founded by SIM missionaries in 1952, was led by Dr. George Campion, its first medical director and surgeon, alongside missionary colleagues including Dr. Janet Troup, who contracted and survived Lassa fever, and Dr. Tracey, a dentist. For more than three decades, they worked under extraordinarily difficult conditions, treating tens of thousands of patients every year and performing hundreds of surgeries.
The hospital also established the ECWA Nursing School, training generations of nurses who went on to serve communities across Kogi State and beyond.
Their work was rooted in a simple but profound conviction: healthcare is a basic human right, regardless of where a person happens to be born.
A son continues his father’s mission
Dr. George Campion returned to Canada with his wife in 1986 and continued working until retiring at the remarkable age of 88. He died on December 30, 2021, at 97.
But the work he began in Egbe did not end with his departure.
His son, Don Campion, carried it forward.
Don is the founder and CEO of Banyan Air Service at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport, a world-class fixed-base operator serving corporate and medical aviation. The name ‘Banyan’ itself is a tribute to his Nigerian childhood and the magnificent shade trees he remembers from Kogi.
About fifteen years ago, Don launched the Egbe Medical Mission. Working with his team, he invested heavily in rehabilitating the hospital, rebuilding deteriorating facilities, installing modern medical equipment and strengthening its power infrastructure.
The result is remarkable.
The hospital has grown from its original 75 beds to approximately 110 beds and serves communities within roughly a 100-mile radius-many of them villages and small towns where reaching another decent hospital can require a two- or three-hour journey over poor roads.
Today, ECWA Hospital Egbe is an oasis of modern healthcare in a profoundly underserved rural region. Its solar and battery infrastructure provides reliable 24-hour electricity across the hospital campus, a particularly striking achievement in an environment where dependable power remains a major challenge.
Returning to Egbe after nearly 50 years
I returned to Egbe in May 2025 for the burial of Mrs. Christina Adewunmi, wife of my former principal at Titcombe College, Dr. Job Adewunmi.
Mrs. Adewunmi had been something of a surrogate mother to that frightened ten-year-old boy of 1976. She often sent me to Egbe Hospital for the scrapes, bruises and other consequences of being a restless schoolboy.
After the burial, I returned to Titcombe College and drove through the hospital and nursing school.
I was struck by what I saw.
The hospital and nursing school had a renewed, almost shining appearance. New infrastructure stood alongside rehabilitated buildings and modern equipment. Yet just beyond their walls was a very different reality: neighborhoods and towns that, in many ways, looked remarkably similar to the ones I remembered from half a century ago.
The hospital and school seemed like an oasis surrounded by a sea of deteriorating buildings-a visible reminder of the economic stagnation and grinding poverty that continue to characterize many rural communities in Nigeria.
The question that stayed with me
Today, I serve as Director of Agriculture and Agro-Industry at the African Development Bank in Abidjan.
As I travelled around Egbe, I kept asking myself a difficult question:
If Dr. George Campion and his son Don could bring the benefits of modern medicine to a remote rural community, what are we doing to strengthen the economic foundations that allow people in that community to thrive?
Healthcare can save lives. But people also need nutritious food, productive farms, decent jobs, functioning roads, reliable electricity and markets that allow them to earn a sustainable income.
In many rural parts of Nigeria, economic activity remains painfully limited. Poor road infrastructure, insecurity, uncompetitive agricultural value chains, dependence on imported food and manufactured goods, and inadequate rural infrastructure have contributed to generations of poverty.
The lack of truck traffic on the roads around Egbe tells part of the story. Where goods are not moving, economic opportunity is usually not moving either.
And where economic opportunity is absent, poverty becomes intergenerational.
This is why I increasingly see rural healthcare and rural economic development not as separate challenges, but as two sides of the same equation.
What can we learn from Egbe?
The story of Egbe offers a powerful lesson.
One family, inspired by a missionary father’s decades of service, chose not to simply remember the past. They invested in its future.
Don Campion could have regarded his father’s Nigerian years as a chapter of family history. Instead, he turned that legacy into action.
The result is a functioning rural hospital that continues to serve hundreds of thousands of people who might otherwise have very limited access to quality healthcare.
We need more of this spirit-not only in healthcare, but across rural development.
We need to ask how agriculture can create jobs, how rural businesses can grow, how roads can connect farmers to markets, how local processing can replace imported goods, and how investment can turn rural communities from places people leave into places where people can build prosperous lives.
Affordable, nutritious food-produced efficiently by modern agriculture or purchased with income from a stable job-is, after all, one of the most fundamental forms of medicine.
Dr. George Campion and his colleagues planted a seed in Egbe more than seven decades ago.
His son Don has continued to nurture it.
The lesson for all of us is simple:
We can borrow a leaf from the Campions.
We can choose to invest-not merely in the problems we see today, but in the institutions, infrastructure and economic opportunities that will change the trajectory of rural communities for generations to come.
One hospital at a time.
One farm at a time.
One community at a time.
Dr Martin Fregene, Director, Department of Agriculture and Agro-Industry, African Development Bank African Development Bank Group (AFDB).