HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept
{
"id": 1358710,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1358710/?format=api",
"text_counter": 112,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "His Excellency the President",
"speaker_title": "",
"speaker": {
"id": 168,
"legal_name": "Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta",
"slug": "uhuru-kenyatta"
},
"content": "the capacity to effectively deliver learning and teaching at junior school levels. Hon. Omboko Milemba can confirm this. With changes to the entry requirements for Teacher Training Colleges (TTCs), admission has increased by 300 per cent to now 20,456 trainees. I was privileged to open the Kwale TTC, which had less than 100 students a few months ago. When I went there, the Principal told me that the numbers had increased four times. At the tertiary level, the working party recommended an overhaul of the existing education funding framework to a valuable scholarship and loan model to address the financing gap, which denied many Kenyans the opportunity to pursue tertiary education in our universities and Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) centres. It also created many complications in our universities and institutions of higher learning. By last year, our universities had accumulated debts of close to Ksh60 billion. I sat down with all the vice- chancellors of our 41 public universities, and we came up with a proposal that we are now implementing. The new model for financial support is student-centred and deploys a rigorous and impartial means testing instrument to establish the level of need of every student, which then becomes the primary consideration in allocating scholarships and loans. To fully democratise our education system and make higher education accessible and affordable to all, we have also chartered the Open University of Kenya following requisite Cabinet and parliamentary approvals. I want to thank this House for expediting the Open University of Kenya Charter that had been in the works for the last 10 years. I also want to announce to you that the first 1,000 students will report next month. In the course of consulting Kenyans from all walks of life during the formulation of the Bottom-up Economic Transformation Agenda, the fundamental contribution of health to citizen wellbeing and the role of costs in driving up poverty were identified as chronic. The implications are very clear, and we cannot afford to delay the delivery of universal healthcare anymore. Consequently, we have instituted radical reforms in the provision of healthcare services in Kenya, including the enactment of four new laws that will anchor the implementation of this bottom-up approach to healthcare. I am tremendously grateful to this House and Hon. Members for enacting the Primary Health Care Act, the New Social Health Insurance Act, the Digital Health Act, and the Facility Improvement Financing Act. Hon. Members, these laws, will usher in and guarantee a new era in the provision of healthcare by covering all essential services from preventive, promotive, curative, palliative, and rehabilitative services, thus guaranteeing every Kenyan access to comprehensive and quality healthcare. Under Afya Nyumbani, we have scaled up our investment in the healthcare workforce by employing 20,000 new healthcare workers. We have also deployed 8,429 workers whose contracts had lapsed and enrolled 3,394 interns across the country to increase the availability of human capital in our public health sector. Working with county governments – again I am grateful to them – we have taken measures to resolve the perennial challenge of human resource management in the health sector which has been the cause of many strikes. We have established the Kenya Health Human Resource Advisory Council (KHHRAC) which will be a trusted mediator between government at both the levels and our health sector workers. Further, under the Afya Nyumbani model, we identified preventive care as an essential pillar of healthcare service delivery because it enables Kenyans to manage their conditions early enough before they cause serious harm to their wellbeing and productivity. Community health promotion is our bottom-up intervention to deliver preventive and promotive health solutions at the grassroots. Community Health Promoters (CHPs) will visit Kenyans at their homes, provide basic diagnoses for common conditions, and refer cases to appropriate medical facilities. Together with all 47 counties, we have deployed 100,000 community health promoters fully equipped with the necessary kits and an electronic community health information system. The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}