By Mike Mwaniki
Kenya has received an additional Sh400 million from the Global Fund to assist in the fight against HIV among children. The money was donated by the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation.
It will be channeled through the Global Fund, which supports HIV, TB and malaria control programmes in Kenya. The additional funding is expected to finance interventions on the register of unfunded quality demand (UQD) for the Kenya HIV programme.
“Sh300 million will be used to procure pediatric ART commodities with the remaining amount to be used in essential supporting interventions related to service delivery,” the Global Fund said in a statement.
The new additional funding comes after Kenya and the Global Fund in January 2018 signed six agreements worth Sh38 billion to assist in the fight against HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
The grants aim to reach 1.3 million people living with HIV/Aids and ART by 2021 as well as drastically expanding interventions to find more missing cases of TB. The Global Fund announced that the grants would be managed by the National Treasury, AMREF Health Africa and the Kenya Red Cross.
The Ministry of Health and County governments were mandated to manage the implementation of the agreements. The Global Fund noted that Kenya has made great progress against HIV and malaria in the last few years.
HIV prevalence, (for example), has reduced from 10.5 per cent in 1996 to 5.4 per cent in 2016. In addition, since 2009, Kenya has reduced new infections among children by 44 per cent.
Malaria prevalence went down from 11 per cent in 2010 to eight per cent in 2015. The National Aids and STI Control Programme (NASCOP) Head, Dr Kigen Bartilol says an estimated 1.6 million people are living with HIV in Kenya.
“Although the national HIV prevalence rate has declined from a high of 14 per cent in the 1990s to the current 5.9 per cent, Kenya is still experiencing about 71,000 new HIV infections annually,” he said.
Out of this number, 13,000 are new infant HIV infection. At the same time, there are 120,000 children aged 0 to 14 years who are living with HIV. President Uhuru Kenyatta, who has identified Universal Health Coverage (UHC) as among his “Big Four Agenda”, recently urged county governments to support the initiative by ensuring they increased the number of their residents who are enrolled in the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) cover scheme.
Two counties, Makueni and Laikipia have hit the ground running after enrolling a majority of households in their areas into the NHIF scheme enabling those enrolled after paying a Sh500 fee to access affordable and quality healthcare services in their jurisdictions. Currently 7 million Kenyans have enrolled into the NHIF cover scheme.
The President, while opening the 5th Devolution conference held in Kakamega County, urged Governors to ensure they trained and recruited more doctors and nurses and also improved the quality of care as well as health facilities in their respective counties.
“Through UHC we should ensure we take care of ‘Wanjiku’ by ensuring that all the required medicines are made available in our public health facilities,” he said.
