mHealth in Kenya: great potential but many challenges to address

Kenya is a country of 41 million people and US$783 GDP per capita. With a health system still needed to be put in place, Kenya’s major health concerns are:

• High HIV prevalence rates (HIV rate is 6.3%);
• Extremely high rate of maternal and infant deaths (the proportion of women who die in childbirth is 1 in 39); and
• A high burden of tropical parasitic and bacterial infections

Working with the Global Health Initiative, the Kenyan government’s GHI Strategy is focused on addressing three objectives: moving from disease-specific treatment to preventive care; finding cost savings; and doubling the number of mothers who have access to a skilled birth attendant and to emergency obstetrical care. [1]

mHealth has the potential to achieve these objectives because of its cost efficiencies and possibility to reach  rural areas with various services across the patient healthcare pathway and health systems [2].

Nairobi: the city that I am visiting at the moment

I just returned from a great meeting organised by m:Lab East Africa called Wireless Wednesday, where  over 50 people attending discussed the various challenges and roles that mHealth is facing in Kenya.

It was interesting to hear that mHealth initiatives in Kenya face similar challenges to those initiatives in South Africa, including: a lack of collaboration between various stakeholders in mHealth ecosystem; a duplication and fragmentation of mHealth services and products; a lack of market understanding and its needs; a lack of mHealth services’ awareness; and finally, no overview of what mHealth initiatives are already happening within the country.

Along with the above mentioned challenges, participants in yesterday’s meeting also highlighted several calls-to-action that are needed in Kenya:

• Better alignment between various mHealth stakeholders;
• Creation of working group-like body that would coordinate, connect and above all reduce fragmentation and duplication;
• Need for primary research; and
• Improved advocacy and promotion of mHealth services.

The GSMA addresses most of the above through its Pan African mHealth Initiative, where its main aims are to reduce fragmentation, align the health and mobile industries and successfully integrate mobile and ICT into the health system by bringing together our mobile operator members  across Africa, governments, civil society and private healthcare providers to develop and launch a suite of m and eHealth services.

In addition the GSMA is committed to the creation of National Repositories of Information to help Inform decision making, Identify catalysts, barriers and best practices, and Advocate amongst public and private health and mobile stakeholders using the information as the basis for facilitated discussions.

For more information on the Pan African mHealth Initiative and National Repositories of Information, please contact us on mhealth@gsm.org.

For information on various mHealth initiatives, click here. For more information on GSMA mHealth resources, click here.