The new ePOD app, a partnership between KEMSA and Coca-Cola Beverage Africa with support from UNFPA, taps into Coca-Cola’s expertise in supply chain management and distribution. Photo UNFPA/Luis Tato

ISIOLO, Kenya – As a frontline health-care worker at Isiolo County referral hospital, Denis Mutirithia has a critical role in saving lives – and a new digital tool to help him do so. The pharmaceutical technologist is tasked with predicting and preventing shortages and stockouts of essential medical supplies, including contraceptives.

If he receives stock from the Kenya Medical Supplies Authority (KEMSA) on time, the hospital's patients will have access to the medicines they need, when they need them. But delayed supplies can unleash a litany of crises, from illness to unintended pregnancies and higher risk of maternal and newborn deaths. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged health systems and shuttered health facilities, family planning and contraceptives have been among the most extensively disrupted services. The costs are being borne by the most vulnerable women and girls, with spikes in unintended pregnancies reported among adolescent girls in some parts of Kenya. 

“When a woman’s reproductive health is stuck, her life is also stuck,” said Editar Ochieng, founder of a women’s shelter and legal aid organization in Kibera, a sprawling slum in Nairobi. “Access to contraceptives is one of the most crucial empowerment tools that women in Kibera need to improve their lives, but often this is not available.”

Innovations empowering women

Now, a new mobile phone app is set to become a game changer for health-care workers like Mr. Mutirithia. The Electronic Proof of Deliveries, or e-POD app, keeps track of supplies to primary health facilities through the simple touch of a button and was developed to improve essential deliveries across Kenya.

“By checking the app on my phone, I am able to tell when a particular delivery of family planning commodities is expected to arrive. This helps us to advise clients accordingly, so that they get their method of choice at their next appointment,” he says.

The e-POD app received an award for best innovative health supply chain solution at the 2021 Global Health Supply Chain Summit in December 2021. So far, it has been rolled out in ten counties in the country and is expected to be available in all 47 counties by mid-2022.

The mobile app was developed as part of the Last Mile Kenya programme, implemented through a partnership between KEMSA and Coca-Cola Beverage Africa, with the support of UNFPA. It uses GPS to ensure that deliveries arrive where and when they are supposed to, and health facilities can easily report back on whether they received the correct specifications. The app also monitors order turnaround times to prevent delays that could lead to exhausted stocks of life-saving supplies.

Acting Chief Executive Officer of KEMSA, Edward Njoroge, said: “With this new system, we will be able to ensure deliveries to the correct health facilities, in the right quantities and at the right time.”

e-POD is one of two recent family planning tracking apps developed with support from UNFPA. The second is Qualipharm, created with local public health organization HealthStrat, to track consumption of family planning commodities at county, sub-county and facility level. These are, says Charity Koronya, of UNFPA, “a game changer, not only for health care staff but also for the citizens who rely on public health facilities to access life-saving commodities.”  

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected women’s access to family planning information and services around the world, with some 12 million women experiencing disruptions to family planning services since it started, particularly in low-income countries and marginalized communities.

UNFPA works with local and international partner organizations across Kenya to strengthen efforts to ensure universal access and rights to sexual and reproductive health care, reaching over 900,000 people with family planning services in 2020. - United Nations Population Fund

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni speaks during a Reuters interview at the National Leadership Institute (NALI) in Kyankwanzi district, Uganda December 4, 2021. Picture taken December 4, 2021. Photo REUTERS/Abubaker Lubowa

KAMPALA, Dec 31 (Reuters) - Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni on Friday announced plans to lift COVID-19 containment measures in January that had been in place since March 2020, including reopening schools, bars and nightclubs, citing rising vaccination rates.

The East African nation has imposed some of Africa's toughest restrictions. In September, some measures were eased, including allowing the resumption of education for universities and other post-secondary institutions.

In a televised speech late on Friday, Museveni said pre-primary, primary and secondary schools would be reopened on Jan. 10.

Bars and nightclubs will be reopened, and a nighttime curfew lifted, two weeks after schools have resumed, he added. Movie theatres and sporting events would also be allowed to reopen, he said, without giving further details.

As of Friday, Uganda had registered about 137,000 confirmed cases and nearly 3,300 deaths.

The president urged Ugandans to get vaccinated as the "first solution" to COVID-19. - Reuters

KidsOR will set up operating theatres in Burundi, like this one in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Photo via The Sunday Post

In his time as a general surgeon in Burundi, Central Africa, Dr Alliance Niyukuri regularly found himself unable to help child patients with treatable conditions and injuries.

Those with problems such as broken bones, cleft palates – and other health issues which might elsewhere be considered fairly minor surgical conditions – are routinely turned away in the poverty-stricken country, which currently has no paediatric surgery service at all.

In the absence of medical support and often unable to pay for foreign treatment, families regularly find themselves dealing with years-long waiting lists or even the death of their child.

But now, thanks to charity Kids Operating Room (KidsOR), Niyukuri is one of two Burundian surgeons undertaking training to become the nation’s first ever paediatric surgeons.

They will operate from a new, fully equipped children’s operating room which will open in 2023.

KidsOR chief executive David Cunningham said the charity has invested £500,000 in the three-year initiative. “We are very proud to lead on this first-ever programme to train local surgeons for the children of Burundi,” he said. “The absence of paediatric specialists there has led to dependency on visiting doctors, or worse, no care at all.

“Our commitment to train local people and create world-class operating rooms for them to work in changes that. It is the first step on the journey towards independence of healthcare for the children of Burundi.”

He added: “By funding two surgeons to train in paediatrics means that they will then be able to go on and train other colleagues. This will help many thousands of children and it will be a legacy that will last for ever.”

Niyukuri said that in his time as a general surgeon in Burundi he had seen a number of children who had later passed away as a result of birth defects that are easily treated in more affluent countries.

KidsOR, which has bases in Edinburgh, Dundee and Nairobi, works to ensure that children around the world have access to safe surgery and, so far, the charity has provided more than 40,000 children in some of the world’s poorest countries with essential or emergency operations.

KidsOR’s Africa director Rosemary Mugwe said: “The Republic of Burundi is a low-income economy. The population of children is about 50%, but they do not have a single trained paediatric surgeon or any dedicated theatre for children in the whole country.”

Adult patients are routinely prioritised in general surgery because they are of working age. And yet, Mugwe points out, 85% of children in the sub-Sahara region will require some form of surgery before their 15th birthday.

“The best intervention for us was to say: ‘Can we train the country’s first paediatric surgeons and, when they successfully complete their training, can we support them with a state-of-the-art operating room of their own?’ It’s about giving them capacity and then building that on capacity.”

“This approach is important as the local person will understand better the local healthcare system, the social and cultural set-up of their country and is more likely to stay,” says Niyukuri, who recently moved to Blantyre, Malawi, to begin his surgical training.

“I grew up in Burundi and worked as a general surgeon and now I will practice paediatric surgery in my own country.”

Dr Jean Baptiste Nzorironkankuze, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Health for Burundi, welcomed the Scots charity’s trailblazing initiative.

He said: “We are thankful for what Kids Operating is doing to improve the wellbeing of the Burundian children in need of surgical care.” - Russell Blackstock, The Sunday Post