In 2021, the Kenyan MoH committed to fully adopt a national digitized system for community health that will support all 95,000 CHWs nationwide. Living Goods is honored to be a key partner throughout this journey and to support government ownership throughout the process.

We’ve been so encouraged by government’s evident commitment to the digitization journey, in a process that began with prioritized stakeholder engagement, and culminated with the development and March launch of the National Digitization Strategy for Community Health we helped influence.

Owing to our strong track record, Living Goods was nominated by MoH as the key partner in leading county-level stakeholder engagement, trainings of trainers, and piloting the eCHIS tool— modeled on our Smart Health app—with 600 CHWs in Kisumu County. Learnings from the pilot, underway through March 2022, will inform scale-up in other counties.

Since the launch, we’ve been providing thought partnership to government to address gaps identified during the stakeholder engagement process, to enhance the design of eCHIS tools and ensure interoperability with the Kenya Health Information System. Additionally, MoH kickstarted development of an eCHIS curriculum Living Goods supported that includes a competency framework to measure the skills of trained CHWs, which is scheduled to conclude in 2022.

We’ve also been supporting government to ensure their ambitious plan drives sustainable improved health outcomes and better use of data for decision-making, by providing support on service delivery and supply chains, and capacity building on performance management approaches, quality assurance, monitoring and evaluation, data management, and more.

Despite the great strides and strong results emerging from the Kisumu pilot, the process has involved intricate adjustments and learnings both for Kenya’s MoH and Living Goods. The lack of long-term financing plans from national and county levels of government has been challenging. We’ve also needed to realign to overcome infrastructure gaps, given insufficient standards around information enterprise design, which would better support a seamless data flow.

In 2022, we look forward to collaborating with government and other stakeholders to co-finance the eCHIS scale-up. Key areas of focus will include institutionalizing governance structures, the system’s performance management framework, and enhancing the eCHIS tool to ensure its effective integration with existing systems such as KHIS. We’ll also focus on helping to build the capacity of CHWs, and providing technical support to MoH on eCHIS implementation and how to manage a digital product.