Introduction

In 2013 elections, the Kenyan Government through elections decided to decentralize the Central government and established county governments to provide the same services that the National Government. The County governments negotiated a working relationship with the national government in terms of power and revenue sharing, and have encountered political, fiscal and administrative challenges in the delivery of services to Kenyans.

As new entities, county governments lacked the capacity, knowledge and resources to effectively deliver the devolution dividend of shared prosperity, enhanced delivery of vital services and improved management of public resources.

This project aims at identifying the number of health facilities in Kenya. Through mapping out the distribution of Health Facilities in Kenya, we will provide a visual representation and further inform the government on resource allocations for each county, that is, determine how many health workers can support the population of each county, how many beds will be required, how many more facilities are required etc. This representation will facilitate faster and better decision making by the policy makers.

Sections

This report has the the following information outline: 

  1. The Population of Kenya in 2019
  2. Health facilities distribution in Kenya
  3. The Number of health Facilities in each County by category
  4. The number of core health workers per population in each County

Population of Kenya in 2019

The demography of Kenya is monitored by the Kenyan National Bureau of Statistics. Kenya is a multi-ethnic state in the Great Lakes region of East Africa. It is inhabited primarily by Bantu and Nilotic populations, with some Cushitic-speaking ethnic minorities in the north. Its total population was at 47,564,296 as of the 2019 census.

Kenya’s population was reported as 47.6 million during the 2019 census compared to 38.6 million inhabitants 2009, 28.7 million in 1999, 21.4 million in 1989, and 15.3 million in 1979.

Health facilities Distribution

The health sector comprises the public system, with major players including the MOH and parastatal organisations, and the private sector, which includes private for-profit, NGO, and FBO facilities. Health services are provided through a network of over 4,700 health facilities countrywide, with the public sector system accounting for about 48.5 percent of these facilities.

The government health service is supplemented by privately owned and operated hospitals and clinics and faith-based organisations’ hospitals and clinics, which together provide between 30 and 40 percent of the hospital beds in Kenya.

County Facilities

The report further analyses the number of facilities in Kenya per category in each county and gives it equivalent proportion in percentage form.

Core Health workers per 10,000 Population

Accurate and timely data on the health workforce is key to provide a reliable, county-level situational assessment in all counties. For example, the media reported a migration of health workers from public sector to private sector and from counties considered hardship areas after the health management was devolved to counties, leaving the counties with fewer workers. A health workforce situational analysis enables the leaders to project and plan for the future.

Conclusion

The Government of Kenya need to distribute resources evenly, this is because from the distribution of facilities a major concentration is on the big cities unlike in the Northern and Eastern part of the country which have high population of over 12 Million. These data enrich the perspective of the leadership to better plan the allocation of healthcare resources according to need and demand.