Kilifi County signs MOU with AMREF on Universal Health Care

Universal Health CareParticipants follow proceedings during the launch of Kilifi county government has launched a poverty mapping at Silver Palm hotel in Kilifi county.

The County Government of Kilifi has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with AMREF Health Africa (AHA) to conduct a poverty mapping survey for the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) medical cover.

The county seeks to identify and enrol 35,376 poor households to the NHIF as part of the National Universal Health care Coverage (UHC).

The event was graced by Kilifi Deputy Governor Gideon Saburi, county health executive committee member Charles Dadu and AMREF officials led by Robert Njuguna and Bill Olwenda.

The mapping will involve working with Community Health Volunteers who will be trained and mentored in collecting the data as part of their routine door-to-door health campaign. 

AMREF Health Africa has provided value addition by digitalizing the tool and hosting it on their digital platform “M-Jali” and will also train the mappers on how to administer the tool and reporting.

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Eng Saburi said the county started this program in 2018 and together with different stakeholders, have been looking at how to address the issue of health care for the poor families in the county.

“Among the stakeholders in this program is the NHIF, AMREF and the ministry of labour and social services. We have come together to initiate proper programs to shield our people from different challenges when accessing medical services in health facilities. Together with AMREF for example, we have been collecting data to identify the need cases, how many households’ needs our help,” said DG Saburi.

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The County Government has already registered into the NHIF subsidization programme, a total of 1,000 members of the community with pre-existing chronic medical conditions including Diabetes, Hypertension, Kidney diseases, Epilepsy and Sickle Cell.

“Our role as the county is to make sure that the collected data is delivered to us in time so that it can be worked on especially in our health facilities in the rural areas where we currently have about 141 facilities registered with NHIF,” said DG Saburi. 

The county with the support of the national government aims at registering at least 20 per cent of all poor households in the county by the end of the 2020/2021 financial year.

“In the first phase of this programme, we are focusing on about more than 35,000 families but as we roll out the programme, we expect the numbers to increase to more than 171,000 poor households are addressed. 

AMREF Health Innovation Projects manager Mr Bill Olwenda said they will assist the county in configuring the data through their M-Jali tool to enable the devolved government to identify the needy households for action.

“We have been in Kilifi for short term response projects but we have now seen that the leadership is now much focused on innovative solutions to address healthcare in this country,” he said.

Mr Olwenda said the organization through M-learning platform has so far trained more than 3,000 CHV in the last three-four months. It is though that partnership that the health member asked how they could further their engagement in different areas.

“The discussion is what culminated in the launch of social-economic survey mapping. That tool is there and it was developed by the department of labour and social protection, ministry of health, AMREF and other stakeholders were involved.  

We have the M-Jali, a mobile platform which in its, have digitized the questionnaire that can be used by the Community Health Volunteers(CHVs) in villages to garner the data and submit. Through targeted questions and the formula applied, then we get what is known as social stratification which shows the rich, middle class, the poor and the poorest of the poor,” said Mr Olwenda.



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