Kenya will become the third country in Africa and the first in East Africa to host a health financing summit, previously held in Zambia and Malawi.
The summit aims to pull stakeholders towards achieving sustainable and effective financing for healthcare in accordance with national and regional commitments.
From Monday, Kenya will host the first-ever summit on high-level national dialogue on health financing.
It will be a three-day summit to bring together various stakeholders in the health sector including the Ministry of Health, the Council of Governors, representatives from the African Union, EAC ministers, Global Fund, Gates Foundation, USAID and UNAIDS among others.
As part of the implementation of the Africa leadership meeting the AU has given the mandate to regional economic communities to support member states in holding national health financing dialogues.
According to Health CS Susan Nakhumicha, such dialogues serve as platforms to discuss, build consensus and identify ways to support domestic health financing priorities by bringing together important national and international stakeholders.
“The government has recognised the importance of investing in health evidenced by the gradual increase in contribution to the financing of healthcare services over the past 10 years,” Wafula said.
“We are not yet there, the Abuja declaration was 15 per cent, we are way below that so we must work together to ensure that we get to 15 per cent,” she added.
Subscribe to Switch TV for more content
The East African Community is the regional economic community responsible for supporting the government of Kenya in implementing the African leadership meeting agenda including the national health financing dialogues.
The dialogue will be important for Kenya to identify priority areas to improve on how it can achieve targets set within the health financing strategy.
During the dialogue, experts will present research findings on Kenya’s health financing system and this will help policymakers to discuss the strategies to address the challenges that the country faces.
Read Also: Health CS Suspends Officials Involved in Fraud Scheme
