A new survey paints a bleak picture of the country’s state of healthcare system. The urban survey on reproductive health shows that rapid urbanisation is worsening the situation. And as the country continues to experience upheavals in the health sector, with financing being the key challenge, a survey conducted in five key cities in the country shows that demand for health services is reaching crisis levels.
Experts say it requires urgent innovative approaches to address it, but mainly favour investment in family planning as the most cost-effective strategy. The Kenya Urban Reproductive Health Initiative (Kurhi), dubbed Tupange documents arguments by experts, where they agree that, family planning would be the most cost-effective intervention in a situation where a third of the country’s population now lives in urban areas.
“At present, Kenya’s urban population is estimated at 32 per cent of the country’s total population, with between 60 and 80 per cent of them living in slums with limited access to basic health services as a result of poor provision of essential health infrastructure and services,” the survey conducted in three phases between 2010 and 2014 says.
The survey whose contents were released yesterday in Nairobi by a team of officers from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemri) shows that, even though contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) is higher in urban than rural areas, only 23 per cent of people living in informal settlements have access to family planning services.
Conducted by the Measurement, Learning and Evaluation (MLE) project to examine the impact of Tupange, the survey indicates that use of modern contraceptives among the urban poor rises when family planning is offered alongside other maternal and child health services.
The study also indicates that less women are giving birth at home in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Kakamega and Machakos. The survey, launched yesterday by the Principal Secretary for Devolution, Mwanamaka Mabruki, was carried out among 4, 800 clients in 377 private and public facilities as well as over 900 healthcare providers.
A baseline study had been carried out prior at the beginning of the project in 2011. Tupange sought to integrate high-quality FP services with maternal and newborn services, and to improve the overall quality of family planning services.
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