Kilifi County launches poverty mapping survey

 The county government of Kilifi has launched a poverty mapping survey that aims to identify more than 35,000 households to be enrolled in the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) as part of the universal health coverage.

The survey will be conducted by the Department of Health and Amref Health Africa. The agreement was signed on Thursday.

The exercise will involve community health volunteers who will be trained in collecting the data as part of their routine door-to-door campaigns.

During the launch of the survey at Silver Palm Hotel in Kilifi town, Deputy Governor Gideon Saburi said the county started the programme in 2018.

He added that together with stakeholders, the devolved unit has been looking for ways of addressing health care for vulnerable families.

“We have come together to initiate programmes that will shield our people from the challenges of accessing medical services,” he said.

The other key player in the survey is the Ministry of Labour.

The county government has already registered 1,000 people with chronic medical conditions including diabetes, hypertension, kidney diseases, epilepsy and sickle cell anaemia into the NHIF subsidised plan. 

 “Our role is to ensure the data is delivered fast so that it can be worked on, especially in the 141 NHIF-registered rural hospitals,” Mr Saburi said.

He said the first phase of the exercise which is expected to record 171,000 families, targets 35,376 households.

Amref Health Africa has provided value addition by digitising the tool and hosting it on their digital platform “M-Jali” and will also train the mappers on how to administer the tool and reporting.

The deputy governor said the county aims at registering at least 20 per cent of all poor households in the county by the end of the 2020/2021 financial year.

Amref Health Innovation Projects manager Bill Olwenda said they will support the county government in configuring the data through their M-Jali tool to enable them to identify needy households for intervention.

 He said Amref, through M-learning platform, has already trained more than 3,000 community health volunteers in the last three-four months.

Mr Olwenda said the mapping tool was developed by the department of labour and social protection, Ministry of Health, and Amref. He said the M-Jali, a mobile platform has a digitised questionnaire that can be used by volunteers in villages to fill data and submit.

“The targeted questions and the formula applied provides a social stratification which shows the rich, middle class and the poor,” said Mr Olwenda.  

Article first published on nation.africa