- Renee Bach is an American missionary who founded the charity Serving His Children in Uganda.
- She opened a malnourishment center where 105 children died, and has been sued by some of their families.
- Bach is now the subject of a controversial HBO documentary, “Savior Complex.”
In 2019, NPR correspondent Nurith Aizenman published a report on American missionary Renee Bach with an immediately cutting headline: “American With No Medical Training Ran Center For Malnourished Ugandan Kids. 105 Died.”
A decade earlier in 2009, then 19-year-old Bach, a homeschooled white evangelical Christian teen from Virginia, had set up her charity Serving His Children (SHC) in Jinja, Uganda, after returning from a missionary trip to the East African city. At first, the organization, which Bach told NPR had felt like “a calling from God,” provided free hot meals to children in the neighborhood. Eventually, the organization’s base in Jinja became a feeding center for malnourished children — some of whom had medical needs that demanded more intensive care than what Bach and SHC could provide. According to sources interviewed by NPR, Bach at times provided some of that medical care herself, despite not being medically qualified to do so.
From 2010 through 2015, Bach told NPR, the center treated 940 malnourished children — and, as the report’s headline stated, 105 of those children died.
Amid accusations that she was responsible for those deaths and the threat of civil lawsuits, Bach moved back home to Bedford, Virginia, in 2019, according to a separate report from The New Yorker in 2020. She now has two daughters: Zuriah, the younger, and Selah, whom Bach adopted in Uganda after she was brought into SHC for treatment.
Bach’s time in Uganda has made her the face of white saviorism in Africa. She’s reportedly been sued twice in Ugandan court by family members of children who died or were injured after receiving treatment at SHC. Bach has never faced charges in the United States, according to Vanity Fair.
In interviews with The New Yorker and in affidavits for civil suits against her reported on by ABC News, Bach’s detractors say that she lured desperate Ugandan family members away from better-equipped hospitals to seek treatment for their children at SHC instead, passing herself off as a licensed medical professional. However, others — like Abner Tagoola, the head of the pediatric hospital in the nearby town of Nalufenya, who worked with Bach — disputed that criticism when speaking to The New Yorker in 2020. Tagoola told the New Yorker that he believed Bach acted out of “desperation” to help the sick babies who came to SHC.
According to The New Yorker, an independent investigation conducted by the Uganda Medical and Dental Practitioners Council in response to a 2019 suit against Bach found no evidence that Bach had provided medical care. The investigation also stated that it was “unable to support allegations that children died in large numbers due to the services of SHC.” Bach and SHC, which has since been dissolved, have maintained that Bach never represented herself as a doctor.
The controversy and ongoing legal battles have been the subject of multiple journalistic investigation in various mediums. In addition to the reports by NPR and The New Yorker, an iHeartRadio podcast titled “The Missionary” explored her story in 2020. And now, she’s the subject of “Savior Complex,” an HBO documentary directed by investigative journalist and documentarian Jackie Jesko, airing now on HBO and available to stream on Max.
“I feel like I’ve taken the hit for every single white person who’s ever stepped foot in Uganda,” Bach says in an interview for the documentary.
Bach and Serving His Children were first called out by the organization No White Saviors in 2018
As The New Yorker reported, No White Saviors was founded by Ugandan social worker Olivia Patience Alaso and white American social worker Kelsey Nielsen, with the goal to “decolonize development” and call out examples of the white savior complex. The group’s criticism of Bach, starting as a social-media campaign in 2018, was the first campaign to thrust the group into the spotlight, and The Guardian credited No White Saviors with helping to bring attention to Bach’s story.
In 2022, The Guardian reported that Nielsen resigned from the organization over accusations of leveraging her white privilege and pushing its Black members to the margins. One employee at the time, Rwothomio Kabandole, told The Guardian that Nielsen presented herself as “the most radical person in the organization for black liberation.” Nielsen told the publication in a statement that she had been “resistant” to seeing her own actions as indicative of her white privilege, saying she had been “extremely hypocritical.”
Following Nielsen’s departure, the organization restructured into a Black- and African-led non-governmental organization. On September 15, the organization released a statement on HBO’s “Savior Complex” documentary series on X, formerly known as Twitter, saying that it had been led to believe that the documentary would focus on the group’s work. Instead, the statement continued, the trailer indicated that the series was “giving a central voice and sympathy to white woman fragility tears.”
“We have our own story to tell about this and we plan to do so through a Black and African-led media company,” NWS wrote.
Bach settled a Ugandan civil suit regarding the deaths of two children in 2020
Ugandan civil rights attorney Primah Kwagala brought a civil suit against Bach on behalf of two mothers whose children died in January 2019, according to NPR. The filing included excerpts from the blog Bach maintained about SHC’s activities, and photos from her own website as well as from a site run by another volunteer.
Those mothers were Gimbo Zubeda, whose son Twalali Kifabi died in Serving His Children’s care, and Annet Kakai, whose son Elijah Kabagambe died at home after receiving care from Serving His Children, NPR reported in July 2020. In the lawsuit, the outlet reported, former volunteers and Serving His Children staff alleged that Bach had made medical decisions and performed medical procedures like blood transfusions without medical supervision.
Speaking to NPR for its 2019 report, Bach acknowledged that she would perform procedures like IV insertion and running tubing for a transfusion. She maintained, however, that while she was sometimes not directly supervised by a medical professional, those actions were always “under the request and direction of a medical professional.”
Both mothers, as well as Kifabi’s grandmother Ziria Namutamba, who brought Kifabi to Serving His Children for treatment, appeared in court in January 2020, the New Yorker reported. At the time, the publication reported that the magistrate ordered both parties to attempt mediation before the court would take action.
In its July 2020 story, NPR reported that Bach had settled the lawsuit, agreeing that she and Serving His Children would jointly pay approximately $9,500 to each mother, without admitting liability.
Kwagala told NPR at the time of the 2020 settlement that Bach personally apologized to the mothers, saying that she would not return to Uganda or be involved in any medical practice in the country. Bach’s attorney David Gibbs confirmed to NPR that Bach did speak with the mothers, saying that Serving His Children was shutting down due to factors related to the lawsuit, “media pressure,” and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There’s no amount of money that can bring their kids back to life,” Kwagala told NPR in 2020, saying that while trying for her clients, it had brought them some “closure.”
4 other Ugandan families later took legal action against Bach and requested criminal charges be brought against her
In January 2021, The Guardian reported that four more Ugandan families had filed another lawsuit against Bach. Those families took their children to Serving His Children, the outlet reported, and three of them later died. Documents related to the lawsuit, filed in Ugandan court, said that those children died after receiving treatment, and that the fourth child had health problems after having surgery at the center.
One parent, Lukiya Nakaja, said that she was “angry” after learning that Bach wasn’t a doctor. Her daughter Eva died in 2013, and per The Guardian, Nakaja alleged in her affidavit that Bach had given her daughter tablets, connected her to oxygen, and put tubes into Eva’s nose without explaining what she was doing.
“We hope there will be justice for these affected families, and that it will be a deterrent measure for people who abuse development work,” Robert Okot, a lawyer representing the four families, told The Guardian. The lawsuit requests compensation for the families, a public apology from Bach, and for the court to “order criminal sanction” against her, per the outlet.
NPR reported that No White Saviors, which had connected the mothers in the first lawsuit to Kwagala for representation, was also working with Okot on other cases against Bach. No White Saviors said in a September 2023 post on X that the second case was “still ongoing” and that it was “hopeful that the affected families will one day get justice.”
But Bach’s legal counsel David Gibbs III told Insider that the lawsuit referenced by The Guardian and No White Saviors had “never been served on Renee,” and that they had “never seen it.” He confirmed to Insider that to his knowledge, the only lawsuit filed against Bach was the one that had been settled in 2020.
When reached for comment, No White Saviors and Okot told Insider that the case was still ongoing. Okot told Insider that Bach’s legal team was trying to “deliberately avoid being served,” and that his team had unsuccessfully attempted to contact Gibbs in the past regarding court summons from Uganda. He said his team is attempting to serve Bach in Virginia.
Gibbs did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment. The Judiciary of The Republic of Uganda did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for information on the case.