Collaboration to Enhance End to End Visibility of Health Products and Technologies - Kenya

Afya Ugavi is a USAID funded supply chain Activity implemented by Chemonics International, whose main purpose is provision of technical assistance to strengthen health commodity supply chain systems at national and county levels in Kenya. Since there was no mechanism to account and report for the Essential Medicines and Medical Supplies (EMMS) in the country, Afya Ugavi developed a set of MS Excel based tools for monthly data collection and reporting, and a Power BI based dashboard for the counties to use for visualization and analysis of the data. Through consultations with County health management teams, and with support from senior County management, the tool was adopted for use in reporting for EMMS commodities. The counties were able to make use of the data for decision making including redistribution from facilities that were overstocked to those understocked. Procurement of the EMMS commodities could also be informed by the actual gaps seen at health facilities, and not in an ad-hoc manner as was happening before due to lack of visibility on stock levels at the facilities. This however, posed two challenges with regards to sustainability of the initiative beyond the life of the activity, and obtaining buy-in at the national level for ownership. At the National level, following several collaborative meetings between the Activity, Department of Health Products and Technologies (DHPT) and other key stakeholders in the process, the tool was adopted to be used to report for EMMS commodities and whose data would be housed at the National Health Information System,DHIS2.The DHPT liaised with the Division of Health Informatics to assign an MOH (Ministry of Health) number (MOH 647) to the tool and create required dataset in the DHIS2 platform to officially recognize the HPT tool as a MoH reporting tool. Counties are now using the tool to report through the DHIS2 platform, successfully transitioning an initiative that was originally being managed and maintained by the activity, to one that is now under full custody of MOH for sustainability.