President Uhuru Kenyatta during the groundbreaking ceremony for Amref International University (AMIU) Ruiru Campus on July 9, 2022. PHOTO | FRANCIS NDERITU | NMG
Last week, President Uhuru Kenyatta excitedly commissioned construction work for a World Health Organization’s regional emergency hub in Kenya; a first in sub – Saharan Africa. The center is poised to serve not only Kenya but the entire African continent in areas such as health emergencies’ disease intelligence, stockpiling for health emergencies and training of heath workers.
By virtue of its location, it is set to rapidly reduce emergency response times for disease outbreaks, floods, drought and conflict in the continent.
This new development comes at a time when we have witnessed the debilitating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic that caught the entire world flat-footed due to under-developed emergency response systems.
It also comes at a time when Kenya has made bold strides in expanding the capacity of tertiary clinical care facilities such as the Kenyatta University Teaching and Referral Hospital and the planned Kabarak University Teaching, Research and Referral Hospital.
Other bold steps include the establishment of the National Institute of Public Health within the Ministry of Health to guide the responses of future epidemics and the deployment of “Biontainers” to increase local vaccine production capacity.
The “Biontainers” were developed by the German Pharma giant, BioNTech as a Messenger Ribonucleic Acid (mRNA) technology platform that can be used to rapidly develop life-saving vaccines for viral diseases, Malaria and Tuberculosis. These are diseases that are known to disproportionately burden sub – Saharan Africa.
Whereas these steps are all timely and can improve our disease intelligence systems and responses, real progress will be achieved through the development of well-coordinated approaches for the initiatives.
It is prudent for the Ministry of Health to set up a coordination mechanism that will ensure the ventures do not suffer from the common downfall of siloed approaches. Siloed approaches usually result in duplication of work, inefficiencies, higher than necessary operational costs and eventually a failure of achieving desired outcomes.
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