The Strathmore Prism and the Kenya Health Human Resource Advisory Council (KHHRAC) teams met on Thursday 30th November to review progress with the joint initiative of developing the Workforce Evidence and Learning Library (the Well), an innovative one stop shop for evidence on strengthening the Kenyan healthcare workforce policy, strategy execution and impact.

The session saw Dr John Kihama (the Acting CEO of KHHRAC) and Dr Loice Wanjiru Cushny-Kaigwa (the Well Initiative Manager) co-lead discussions on where the greatest evidence gaps exist on human resources for health, and how the Well Initiative can help fill these gaps.

The teams explored different components of the health workforce value chain, from production and internship evidence, to employment and health labor market dynamics, and finally health workforce migration.

A key observation was the value of taking an ecosystem approach to the initiative, ensuring that all ministries working on HRH-related aspects are engaged fully, including the Ministry of Health (KHHRAC’s parent ministry), the Ministry of Education (workforce production), the Ministry of Labor (workforce migration) and the Ministry of Public Service (workforce employment and career progression matters).

Further, the teams emphasized the value of having the Council of Governors (COG) at the centre of all conversations, ensuring that Governors and Senior COG Secretariat leadership are informed and involved, and that any new evidence generated is transmitted through the COG’s Maarifa Hub.

The KHHRAC CEO observed that the Well Initiative is playing an important role in helping KHHRAC generate evidence for HRH policymaking, noting that KHHRAC only has four technical staff work at the moment, all kindly seconded by MOH to help set up the organization and carry out all tasks assigned by the Health Act of 2017. He applauded the Strathmore Prism team for stepping in to help, noting that the evidence-building work is complementary to the technical support being provided by partners like WHO to improve health workforce performance and impact.

Strathmore University has an MOU with KHHRAC, under which Strathmore is providing technical support to KHHRAC, including leadership and management training support, and research and analyses to build the evidence to guide the MOH, COG and partners as they work to develop policies that strengthen the contribution of the Kenyan health workforce to the universal health coverage goal.