By Helfie Chief Strategy officer, Rania Awad
What a week in Homa Bay, Kenya, taught me about where technology actually belongs in healthcare.
There is a hill above Homa Bay. On my first morning in the county, before a single meeting, my hosts insisted on driving me to the top of it. The whole of Homa Bay opens up beneath you from there: the lake, the hills, the light. I learned something in that moment that shaped the rest of my week. My hosts and the people of Homa Bay, are deeply proud of where they are from, and they wanted me to see its beauty before they showed me its challenges.
I had come to Homa Bay to do serious work, to walk the health system from the inside and understand where technology could genuinely help. I have spent years delivering healthcare as a pharmacist and talking about preventive health, about early detection and getting the right tools into people’s hands. I thought I understood the problem. Then I spent a week inside it.
It is one thing to know, intellectually, that a region is under-resourced. It is completely another to walk the corridors. I visited public hospitals with worn buildings and very little to work with, where clinicians manage some of the most complex cases you will find anywhere and who have somehow bent a threadbare system into something that works. And yet, inside those same buildings, I found things that genuinely surprised me.
At one hospital, the tuberculosis diagnostic pathway ran as a careful funnel: community screening, then vitals, then lab work, then a chest X-ray (some) read by AI in under two minutes with impressive accuracy, then a molecular test to confirm the diagnosis and check for drug resistance. Layered, disciplined, and largely working. Their TB treatment success rate is over ninety percent. The clinical pathway was not the missing piece. Access and Reach was.
Because the real revelation of my week was not health infrastructure. It was people.
In every community I visited, the health system is quietly held together by community health promoters (CHPs). These are trained members of the community who each look after hundreds of individuals, visiting every household they are responsible for, every single month. In one room I met sixteen of them who, between them, cover more than six thousand people. They take vitals, they check blood sugar, they screen for disease, they are trusted, and they turn up.
That is the insight I am carrying home. In global health we tend to assume that the most impressive building is the most capable system- and of course, new and advanced health infrastructure plays a huge role in the delivery of care BUT the strength of what I saw was not its architecture. It was its pathways, and above all its reach into the community. The distribution layer for preventive health already exists in places like Homa Bay. It is human, it is trusted, and it touches nearly every home. The opportunity is not to replace it. It is to amplify it, to put better tools into these promoters’ hands, and increasingly into people’s own phones, so that the person who never reaches a clinic can still be reached in time.
This is exactly the future we are building at Helfie: early detection, proactive prevention, and optimised wellbeing for everyone, with the intelligence living where people actually are, rather than locked inside a building an hour’s drive away.
I am proud to say the week ended with a partnership – a signed memorandum of understanding with the County Government of Homa Bay, to deliver early tuberculosis and hypertension screening for 100,000 people. This is a first and concrete step towards bringing preventive screening to the communities that need it most. There is a great deal of work ahead to turn that intent into impact, and I have every confidence we will do it.
Here’s another thing that happened this week, the thing I did not plan for. I thought I was coming on just another “work trip”… but instead, I ended up falling in love with Homa Bay and Kenya. I arrived to architect a programme. I am leaving connected to it and fully invested in its success. Somewhere between the hardest hospital visits, a lake full of pink flamingos I had never seen before in my life, and a safari through Ruma national park at golden hour, this stopped being a work trip and became something I care about deeply.
The work is not done. It is, in truth, only beginning – and with the help of the incredible Helfie team, Homa Bay county’s ministry of health team and the incredible clinicians and community health promoters on the ground – I am confident that we will get it done.
If you believe, as I do, that prevention belongs in everyone’s hands, I would love to hear from you.
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