News

The Kenya Ministry of Health (MoH) together with the African Institute for Development Policy (AFIDEP) will host the 4th Annual Health Research-to-Policy Conference in Naivasha from November 27-29, 2015.

Other partners co-hosting the conference include the Consortium for National Health Research (CNHR) and the National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation (NACOSTI).

The theme of the conference is “˜Strengthening National and County Agency in Research for Health‘. The focus of the theme is an urgent issue in the country since Kenya has been implementing a devolved health care system since 2010, when the new Constitution came into being.

Within this system, where the national government is charged largely with policy formulation and managing referral health facilities, and county governments are charged largely with providing health care services to Kenyans, critical and complex decisions have to be made, and these require relevant and timely research evidence.

With this focus, the conference will not only deliberate ways in which both the national and county governments and other players can strengthen and enable increased research use, but will also discuss emerging research evidence on key health issues and its implications for policy and programmes.

Specifically, the conference will conduct a deliberative session on the priorities for health in Kenya, and which need to guide research generation in the country to ensure that this is responsive to the country’s urgent health issues.

The outcome of this session will be clarity on Kenya’s priorities for research for health, and will feed into on-going efforts, spearheaded by the CNHR, to develop a research for health policy framework for the country.

The framework will, among others, seek to increase local funding for research for health, as well as improve the coordination and translation of research into health policies and programmes.

The conference will also discuss emerging evidence on cancer, with a focus on Marsabit County, which has recorded increased incidences of cancer in the last few years. Further, the conference will deliberate new evidence on the health issues associated with Miraa consumption.

Another key focus of the conference will be increasing the agency of county and national actors not just for research generation, but also its translation into policy and programme decisions.

Part of this will include a session where AFIDEP will lead the sharing of lessons from its ground-breaking SECURE Health programme (Strengthening Capacity to Use Research Evidence in Health Policy).

Finally, AFIDEP will host three science-policy cafés (i.e. policy dialogues) at the conference on urgent health issues in order to provide evidence-informed recommendations to the national and county governments. The topics of the three cafés are:

• Implementing Kenya’s Community Health Strategy: What should we do differently?
• Lifting the Ban on Genetically Modified Organisms in Kenya: Are there any Implications for Health in the Country?
• Opportunities to Utilize the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a Platform for making Health Research Matter for Policy

The conference will be officiated by the Cabinet Secretaries James Macharia (Health) and Prof Jacob Kaimenyi (Education). Principal Secretary Dr Khadijah Kassachoon (Health) and Peter Munya, Governor ““ Meru County and chair, council of Governors will also be in attendance.