Nairobi, 10 March 2026: Over 900 Kenyans, persons with disabilities, advocates, and allies within the broader disability inclusion movement, have today called on the Social Health Authority (SHA) to review its benefits package to include assistive devices. As it stands today, the current SHA cover does not provide comprehensive coverage for assistive devices such as prosthetic limbs, orthotics, wheelchairs, hearing aids, crutches, and other essential mobility and rehabilitation products. This exclusion places an unbearable financial burden on persons with disabilities and their families.As the Authority approaches the mandatory two-year review of its benefits package, we urge the Social Health Authority and the Ministry of Health to give serious consideration to this petition and the voices behind it, and to use this review process as an opportunity to address a structural barrier that deepens inequality and entrenches poverty.

The shock announcement that the sixty-four-year-old USAID has been cancelled at the stroke of a President’s pen went viral earlier this month. While the international headlines may have subsided, the impact on millions of Kenyans has not. How is the Kenya Kwanza administration and 47 county governments responding to ensure our health rights are not jeopardised?

Grace Njoki Mulei and the Social Health Insurance Fund are trending again. As the 61-year-old patient and whistleblower was arraigned in court yesterday, Kenyans chose to arraign our infant health insurance programme and the National Police Service in the court of public opinion.

The right to health is the entitlement to access health services. This right is integral to all other human rights. To realize this right, Kenya has put in place laws, policies, practices, procedures, and schemes to recognise this right, and the National Hospital Insurance Fund came to be.

By Benta Moige, Zaina Kombo, and Lavendar Namdiero 

Social media platforms exploded with this week’s news that Kenyan men have, on average 3 times more sexual partners than women. As netizens benchmark their personal experiences against the latest Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2022, it is worth keeping in mind Oscar Wilde’s famous observation everything about sex is not about sex; it is about power.

Recent global concerns with a new Covid-19 variant, new county health reforms thinking and the calling off a national health workers strike suggest that rethinking the right to health is timely.

On December 22, 2022, Sakaja Arthur Johnson, the Governor of Nairobi County, Kenya’s capital,  partnered with Cooperative Bank to release patients who had been detained in hospitals due to accrued medical bills. We congratulate Governor Sakaja for such a humanitarian gesture. However, prior to this public good, the rights of these patients were infringed upon. This is unacceptable.

The Patients Rights Charter explains patients’ rights and how patients can register complaints or compliments about any health professional or facility.