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Contraceptives & Family Planning

Double jeopardy for women as contraceptives dry up, and US destroys family planning supplies

Kenya is facing a contraceptive shortage, Defrontera has established, following the withdrawal of US and donor-backed funding—even as Washington destroyed contraceptives worth $10 million (KSh 1.3 billion) that had been earmarked for the developing world. The Head of the Division of Reproductive and...

Maternal health

Win against maternal mortality: Kenya okays use of drug to prevent excessive bleeding at all health facilities

Kenya has allowed the use of a drug that prevents excessive bleeding, the biggest killer of mothers during childbirth, to be administered at all health facilities in the latest push to deal with maternal mortalities in the country. To ensure quality, the government had restricted the use of the...

Malaria

Deadliest Bite: A Defrontera Special Series on Malaria

To test a hypothesis, I asked five people — two adults above 30, a 6-year-old, and teenagers — a question: “Which is the world’s deadliest animal?” The answers were lion, snake, shark, and even Thanos, a character from Marvel Comics. No one mentioned the tiny insect that kills more than 600,000...

Health Systems

EXCLUSIVE: Kenya weighs abandoning gold-standard health survey for facility data

For nearly four decades, Kenya has relied on the five-year Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) to guide policymakers, researchers, and donors in designing health priority interventions. Now, after the US government terminated the survey’s funding this year, it is considering using data collected at...

Malaria

Kenya plans to rotate frontline malaria drugs amid resistance fears

The Ministry of Health (MOH) of Kenya has finalised plans to rotate first-line malaria treatments, as growing evidence shows that the country’s most widely used treatment falls short of the World Health Organization's (WHO) cure threshold. By rotating four artemisinin-based combination therapies...

Nonprofits + Aid

SCOOP: New analysis shows brutal axing of US health funding to Kenya 

The funding cuts by the United States Government (USG) to Kenya are brutal: from hundreds of millions of dollars to almost nothing. New analysis from the Health Security Policy Academy, a US-based global health think tank, shows US funding to Kenyan health non-profits nosedived from $260.9 million...