The Kenya Medical Supplies Agency (KEMSA) has embarked on an exercise to distribute mosquito nets in malaria-endemic areas to prevent the spread of the disease.
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00:30 In the next two weeks, and your excellency,
00:37 I want to take this opportunity to thank you and
00:40 the Mombasa County government for supporting them.
00:44 We are working very well in close to Mombasa County,
00:47 one of the good performing counties in terms of supplies of medicines.
00:52 They have paid our debts.
00:54 And your excellency, I want also to thank you for
00:58 signing an MOU in January with KEMSA,
01:01 which renews our engagement with Mombasa County.
01:05 And also to promise you that while we have been distributing drugs from Nairobi,
01:10 in the next five months, we expect to distribute drugs for
01:14 this region of Mombasa.
01:17 We are opening the Mombasa distribution center sometime in July, June.
01:25 And the construction work, the renovation works are already being contracted.
01:30 And we expect the contract to be done in three months so that we start off.
01:34 That will shorten the amount of time that it takes to get drugs.
01:38 From Nairobi now it's taking anything between two weeks and three weeks to get drugs.
01:42 When we open the regional distribution center here,
01:45 for Mombasa it should take within 48 hours, your excellency.
01:48 And I appreciate the cooperation, the partnership,
01:52 and together we are going to work for the growth of this department.
01:56 The malaria distribution, the malaria net distribution is a national program
02:01 that covers malaria and endemic areas across the country.
02:05 We have some 22 counties that have high malaria incidence in the country
02:11 which are targeted for the mass net distribution every three years.
02:15 So this program is coming after the earlier exercise which was done in 2020, 2021.
02:21 And therefore it's a routine program that is implemented by the national government
02:26 in malaria and endemic areas.
02:29 So this is not timed to the rains, but it's a national program that runs every three years.
02:36 We have done five counties as SAMHSA.
02:39 We have done Kisi, Nyamira, Kisumu, Siaya, Migori, Sofa.
02:50 We are now doing Mombasa. We moved to Itataveta. We moved to Kuale as cluster two.
02:56 So we have several clusters.
02:58 And at the end of the exercise we will have--we should be done by end of May.
03:04 We should have done 18 counties as SAMHSA.
03:07 But our other partner met with the four other counties.
03:12 So in total maybe how many nets are going to be distributed nationwide?
03:15 Nationwide, about 16.2 million nets.
03:20 We are here with a team from SAMHSA.
03:27 This is going to be a countrywide net distribution.
03:30 But in Mombasa you're looking at about in excess of 900,000 nets
03:36 that are going to be distributed.
03:39 The mapping had already previously been done.
03:41 So now it is only an issue of ensuring that nets reach the necessary beneficiaries.
03:49 What we are doing right now here is only enough for one sub-county,
03:53 but the other sub-counties are going on simultaneously.
03:57 I also want to appreciate the partnership that we have with KEMSA,
04:02 including the fact that they are supplying us medicines on time.
04:07 And I am confident and I'm glad to state we are paying our dues on time.
04:15 We have no debt with KEMSA as our medical supplier.
04:21 So they can also be able to confirm that our hospitals have medicine
04:26 because they're the ones who actually supply the medicine to the hospitals.
04:30 So I want to thank you, I want to appreciate the partnership,
04:33 and we will go further from here.
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