Health CS Aden Duale / HANDOUTHealth Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale has made an energetic start — cracking down on SHA fraud, deploying over 6,400 healthcare interns, and pushing forward the rollout of the Social Health Authority (SHA). These decisive actions have boosted confidence in the Ministry and shown a commitment to integrity, service delivery, and universal health coverage. However, one crucial pillar remains neglected — the Public Health Division. For years, under successive Cabinet Secretaries, this division has been overlooked, underfunded, and treated as an afterthought. Yet it is the backbone of disease prevention, outbreak control, health promotion, environmental health,…
Author: by Benjamin Kobia Kilemi
Devolution need not be reversed wholesale, but its architecture demands strategic recalibration. The devolution of health services in Kenya—heralded as a bold democratic experiment under the 2010 Constitution—has yielded mixed outcomes. While localized governance has improved infrastructural visibility and political responsiveness in some counties, the case of public health paints a far grimmer picture: one of fragmentation, professional attrition, and resurgent disease burdens. If the central government’s health apparatus once resembled a tightly coordinated neural network, devolution has left it with a severed spine. The Erosion of National Cohesion in Disease Control Public health systems thrive on central coordination, uniformity of…