It started just one month ago with the acquisition of a piece of land. Wa-Wa Kenya, one of our 8 local NGO and System Changer network partners Kenya has started to build a training center in the Lake Victoria region close to Mbita and Homabay.

It is the 5th Making More Health center – besides our more “mature” centers in Webuye, Eldoret, Tongaren and in Mukuru Slums. The center in Webuye has recently started to become self sustainable long-term wise.

Also this center at Lake Victoria follows the concept of holistic and innovative solutions and programs for vulnerable communities while bringing constantly innovation into it through the systemic approach and the System Changer Network Kenya (SCNKenya).

Most of the women and families are extremely poor

At Lake Victoria the main target group are fisher women and families. The HIV prevalence is extremely high. The extreme poverty leads many women and girls to prostitution to get some food on the table for their families.

The HIV infection is the highest in the country, with 15% increase in the last year!

The women in the neighborhood will now be able to come to the center regularly and learn about health topics. A special focus is on income generating activities as one of the main sources of the unhealthy conditions people live in.

They will also benefit from cervical cancer screening, a program supported by our Boehringer Ingelheim colleagues in Austria through the initiative “Together we can” (TWC). They have also invested in the start of this center and in the scale up of income generating activities such as poultry growth (thanks to our US colleague Ellen Lapuk and the Bag2thefuture team who implemented the idea and shared all skills).

Innovative and systemic solutions have reached through the network with the other MNH centers in Kenya and India, such as e.g. the black soldier fly breeding, specific farming and Animal Health activities …

The introduction of a “Cultural house in close collaboration with our Ashoka and MMH fellow, Markus Raivio, will follow in the next months and complete the mental well-being program.

🎦 -> Listen here! Cavin Odera, leading Wa-Wa Kenya and myself, Manuela, leading Community Activities under the umbrella of the Making More Health Initiative, had an interesting talk about the importance and influence of the System Changer Network Kenya that we have set up two years ago, about systemic approaches and how this impacted the start of the center.

This center shows already now very clear how important the collaboration and co-creation among the local NGO partners and further network connections is. Long term impact is based on engineering change together with others and systemic approaches while connecting projects and solutions as “small puzzle pieces” to a “big picture”!