Editorial Comments Challenges for nephrology practice in Sub-Saharan Africa

The burden of chronic kidney disease (CKD) and end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) presents a challenge for both developed and emerging countries. While dialysis and transplantation consumes an ever-increasing propor-tion of the health budget in countries such as the United States, Japan and Taiwan, there is limited availability of these expensive therapies in the majority of emerging countries and even less in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and ma-laria account for much of the available funding. Burden of chronic kidney disease The lack of renal registries in most African countries makes it difficult to obtain accurate statistics about CKD. Recently, CKD was reported to account for 8–12 % of hos-pital admissions in Nigeria [1]; it affects mainly youn