GKSD holding has been named the winner of the United States Healthcare Diplomacy Award 2026 by American Recognition Awards for its cross-border healthcare model that builds and operates hospitals in markets others avoid.
Chairman Kamel Ghribi and GKSD Holding have been named winners of the United States Healthcare Diplomacy Award 2026 by American Recognition Awards. The award recognizes Ghribi's leadership and the group's work in building and operating healthcare infrastructure across regions where others will not, and its role in using medicine as a form of diplomacy between nations.
Under Ghribi's leadership, GKSD, with Gruppo San Donato behind it, operates a model that is difficult to copy. Most healthcare groups either invest in hospitals or run them. GKSD does both, and more: it can finance a hospital, design it, build it, equip it, staff it with its own doctors and train the local teams who will run it. That is why it can work in markets others avoid.
In Iraq, GKSD signed management contracts with the Ministry of Health, including the 492-bed Sayyab Teaching Hospital in Basra. In Libya, the group agreed to manage hospitals and is building a medical academy in Benghazi. In Poland, it took a different route, investing through American Heart of Poland and acquiring the Scanmed group, which brought more than thirty facilities across forty-eight cities into the group.
Three very different countries, three different ways in — a state contract, a construction project, an acquisition — and the reason all three were possible is that the group is not dependent on any one of them. It brings Italian clinical standards, its own builders and its own capital, and it partners with public health systems instead of competing with them.
GSD and GKSD are market leaders treating 6.5 million patients through a network of 161 healthcare facilities, 11,000-plus doctors, a medical university and a leading research platform. The group also operates a business in environmental technologies aimed at reducing carbon footprint. Ghribi's vision is operationalized through ECAM, The Charter on Africa, which he chairs. ECAM is not a charity; it is a strategic framework for reciprocal partnerships that turn investment, knowledge and technology into tangible outcomes for Africa.
Gruppo San Donato represents the clinical and academic excellence — a network of hospitals and research centers supported by a leading educational platform. Gruppo GKSD represents the strategic, infrastructural and investment arm that makes this excellence scalable and sustainable, also supporting procurement, environmental technologies and an advisory arm helping the public sector in several countries shape healthcare policy development and infrastructure.
"A hospital is the most honest form of diplomacy, because it cannot be built for one side only. Medicine never asks where a patient comes from — which is why health is the one language Africa, the Middle East and Europe already share without translation. Nations sign peace; they do not always keep it. But a hospital that treats your people and mine outlives the government that opened it. If we are serious about peace, we should stop waiting for it to be declared and start building the places where it is practised."
"Health is the one diplomacy no one objects to. Medicine never asks where a patient comes from."
The award comes as Chairman Kamel Ghribi continues to expand GKSD's work across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, building healthcare systems that are resilient, sustainable and integrated across geographies.