Reduce Suffering in Kenya Via Health Care Services

Wangui* lives in a slum surrounding Nanyuki in Laikipia County, Kenya was 20 years old when she became pregnant. After birth, she confided to a neighbor that she didn’t want to have another baby too close to the birth of her first child. Wangui’s neighbor , Rose Mulonzi, who is a community own resource person (CORPs) that partners with CHAT by mobilizing for their family planning services - informed Wambui about CHAT’s mobile health service which focus on providing poor and forgotten communities with access to family planning services. When the clinic’s yellow Land-rover eventually arrived at Wangui’s very humble shelter in this part of the slum, Wangui was visited by Nurse Ann Mwinzi, who works with CHAT’s motor mobile clinic. Having been counseled on a range of family planning methods Wangui decided upon choosing the 5 year contraceptive protection Implant method. “I chose this method because it lasts for 5 years,” Says Wangui. “You can’t forget to take it like you can with the pill -this is five years guarantee protection! Against unwanted pregnancies.” She adds. Through CHAT, women like Wangui are transforming their lives by accessing family planning services. With access to contraceptives she now has the choice to plan for the future and at long last is feeling ‘empowered’ to begin planning her future. “This is what and where, how do they say – “womens empowerment” begins – I have a considerably more ‘power’ to now control a little my future and plan for it.. Wait until I share this with my friends and relations who are and have gone through horrible suffering – unskilled abortions, infanticide, school girl pregnancies - haaa, please, wait let me go and call them….” “It would be the end of the world - a world of hopelessness & ever deepening poverty if I didn’t have this service,” she says, beaming when she returned with some friends. Wangui was lucky to receive professional family planning advice. In many slum communities, widespread myths about contraceptives mean that many women like Wangui don’t have the facts they need to make informed choices. CHAT’s grassroots partner, Rose shared this most apt and very real quote with Wangui, by a UNICEF director, William G. Hollingsworth: “Family Planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single technology now available to the human race”. In this quarter, a total of 22,345 individuals were reached with Family Planning/ ecological awareness services, out of which 8,657 women were provided with different family planning methods of their choice.