Kenya has little provision for mental health.

Despite having a mental health programme, with a focus on community mental health care, the government only spends 0.01% of its health budget on mental health.

This means that there is only one psychiatrist for every 500,000 people. Only a third of these psychiatrists work in the public sector, the rest only take on private patients at great expense.

There is general health insurance available from the government but this only covers hospital bed charges and is only for people in employment, meaning that this support is inappropriate for the treatment of poor mentally ill people in their communities. Also, there is no disability benefit available for people suffering from a mental illness.

Currently, there are no community care facilities for people with mental illnesses and also no regular training for local health care professionals.

Obviously, mental health care in Kenya is very inaccessible for poor mentally ill people.

Our programme in Kenya is just getting off the ground. We were officially registered as BasicNeeds UK in Kenya with the government in December 2005 and our office opened for ‘business’ on the 4th January 2006.

The programme will be piloted in Kangemi, a slum in Nairobi. The population of Kangemi is estimated to be over 75,000 people. In the pilot stage, we are hoping to help at least 500 mentally ill people by giving easy access to treatment and working with communities to raise awareness of mental illnesses and reduce stigma.

Our staff are working hard to get the programme up and running – talking to, training and working with potential partner organisations to get them ready so that they can help us help mentally ill people, doing surveys and research so that we can assess the needs of mentally ill people and measure results in the future, and meeting with representatives of the government and health services.

We held our first mental health camp in the spring in a hall made from old shipping crates. Helping the BasicNeeds staff and psychiatrists were medical students from the local teaching hospital. We have also managed to enlist the help of community health volunteers. The camp was well attended and shows how much demand there are for psychiatric services in Kangemi.

Kenya
Joyce Kingori Programme Manager
House 3, LRN 1/209, Elgeyo Marakwet Road, Kilimani, Nairobi, Kenya
Tel: +254 20 3862155