President William Ruto on Wednesday witnessed the signing of Memorandum of Understandings (MoUs) with learning institutions in the United Kingdom.
Through the deal, King’s College London and the University of Nottingham will join the Kenya-UK Health Alliance in establishing Centres of Health Education and Research Excellence in Kenya.
He also presided over the signing of an MoU with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine to enable in-country pharmaceutical production at the BioVax Institute utilizing the BRITE initiative.
Speaking after the signing of health partnership agreements between Kenyan and British institutions, Ruto said the number of Kenyans with health insurance had more than tripled in the past year.
The Social Health Insurance Fund (SHIF) has brought on board three times or more beneficiaries, President Ruto cited.
“We had about seven million people on health insurance a year ago. We now have 24 million people,” adding that “every day on average 50,000 Kenyans register themselves on our health platform.”
Aside from the surge in health insurance uptake, he outlined reforms to the funding model and crucial steps towards long-term sustainability.
What’s more, the president announced a revamp in health financing to ensure sustainability and equity, especially for vulnerable populations in Kenya.
“As a government, we decided that on matters of health we are not going to depend on donors. We are going to be able to make it sustainable. We are going to build it on locally mobilized resources,” he said.
“For the vulnerable members of our society, health insurance has come down from ten per cent to 2.75 percent. For the rest of us it’s gone up from 0.1 per cent to 2.75 percent of our incomes, and by doing so, we have created sustainable funding.”
Ruto also emphasised efforts to improve the quality of care in public hospitals, working hand in hand with Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja, to acquire equipment for Kenyan hospitals without placing strain on the exchequer.
He noted that Kenya now has 107,000 Community Health Promoters, deployed under a national-county partnership, with 7,840 community health promoters in Nairobi alone.
“These promoters are people who have been trained on the very basics of what to look out for in communities, especially when attending to them on matters of health.”
