2012–07–01
As part of our internship Mariana and I will be visiting all the health facilities in Kisumu East District. We have a few weeks to visit more than 70 facilities. The goal of our work as data and geo-coordinates collectors is to come up with updated data to be used by the Ministry of Health. I guess with these updated information they will be able to coordinate and manage in a more effective manner any health related intervention. This management task involves a big number of partners: privates, public entities at every level, informal facilities, NGOs, charities, etc. I can imagine, so far, the information does not flow as smoothly as it could among all these partners. So it seems a good idea to have the Ministry of Health gathering all inputs and, hopefully, taking full responsibility of the health interventions in the future. Even if I knew the context where I was going to work during the summer I had not foreseen the biggest difficulty I was going to find. It’s the fact that the streets usually have no names (or at least the people don’t know them!) that complicates our task. Finding out where are the places we have to visit makes our work to slow down. Fortunately, we’re finding most of them and registering their geo-coordinates so if the government ends up mapping them out, the next researchers will find the facilities easily.
