In Kajaido county at the celebratory launch of Kenya’s new Community Health Strategy and eCHIS strategy.

In mid-March, Kenya’s MOH launched the third edition of its Community Health Strategy and the inaugural National Community Health Digitization Strategy—important guiding documents whose development and launch Living Goods was a lead partner in conceptualizing. The two five-year strategies are part of the Kenyan government’s bold plan to advance Universal Health Coverage (UHC) through integrated, participatory, and sustainable community health services. 

Costed out at US $406.5 million, the Community Health Strategy provides a framework to standardize the implementation of community health services and outlines plans to strengthen seven priority areas in community health, including governance structures, human resources, sustainable financing, service delivery, data, supply chain management, and partnerships. Living Goods’ work over the past five years in Kenya has helped demonstrate the value of digitally empowering, equipping, supervising, and compensating CHWs, and we are pleased to see that our advocacy efforts have helped ensure all these core elements are reflected in the strategy.

Meanwhile, the costed digitization strategy provides a blueprint for the development and implementation of a standardized national electronic community health information system (eCHIS). This strategy—informed by the 2020 eCHIS Landscape Assessment that Living Goods also partnered with the government to develop—is aligned with the government’s aspiration to digitize the entire health system and integrate community health data with the broader eHealth ecosystem. This effort will transform service delivery and performance management in Kenya and will also increase systemwide efficiencies in reporting by enabling data-driven decision-making at operational, technical, planning and policy levels.

Translating these two complementary strategies into practice will ultimately revolutionize primary health service delivery in Kenya by better leveraging technology and data to enhance performance management of the community health workforce.  At full scale, Kenya’s eCHIS will ensure that Kenya’s 95,000 CHWs across all 47 counties are digitally enabled; equipped with tools, training, health commodities and essential medicines; effectively supervised and mentored; and compensated through financial and non-financial incentives and remuneration.  We are enormously proud to partner with the MOH to enable this critical transformation of its health system.