For many women in Mandera County a hard to reach, insecure and arid part of North Eastern Kenya, the story of life from childhood to adulthood is one about sheer pain and struggle for survival. As little girls, they undergo female genital mutilation (FGM), a painful carving out of the external genitalia that leaves them with lifelong physical and psychological scars.
12 December is Jamhuri Day, an auspicious day for Kenya, as it marks her independence from colonial rule in 1963.
Every year, one million Kenyans are driven below the poverty line by healthcare-related expenditures. Poverty predisposes them to disease and slows all aspects of growth in the economy.
Although Kenya has overall made tremendous progress in improving maternal health, some sub-regions remain among the 10 most risky places in the world for women to give birth. The impact is most felt in remote and hard to reach places like, Mandera County, where for every 100,000 live births, about 3,795 women die every year.
The Sustainable Development Goals set forth an ambitious target to provide access to quality, affordable health care for all by 2030 — a target that has evolved into a global movement. Yet, each year, 11 million Africans citizens are pushed into extreme poverty because of out-of-pocket health expenses that trap poor households in cycles of catastrophic expenditure, impoverishment, and illness, particularly in countries lacking social protection and health insurance.
Even as the global community set out the 17 Sustainable Development Goals last year, a realization that stood out is that no single unit has the wherewithal to achieve such lofty goals – they will only be achieved through partnerships.
At the UN General Assembly in New York, a meeting of the Kenya SDG Partnership Platform that I attended on 17 September 2017 provided an extraordinary opportunity for further engagement with a group of private sector partners who are working with us in delivering health care to some of Kenya’s remotest regions.
NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 18 2018 (IPS) - According to Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus, the implementation of UHC is “more a political than an economic challenge”.
Consider this. One million Kenyans fall into poverty every year due to catastrophic out of pocket health expenditures. For the almost four in every five Kenyans who lack access to medical insurance, the fear that they are just an accident or serious illness away from destitution.
