Background

There is consensus across the global health community that embracing innovations is a crucial part of the ambitious plan to achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC) by 2030, as envisaged in the Sustainable Development Goals. By creating better tools, products and approaches – and constantly refining existing ones – we can make faster and more efficient progress to better health outcomes. However, many promising innovations fail to move beyond their pilot stages and never achieve impact at scale.  

Kenya is globally renowned as a hub for innovation and the country’s healthcare landscape is dotted with many innovative solutions at various stages of development and scale. Existing policies are supportive and proactively advocate for innovations to catalyse faster progress. Though fragmented, there are several opportunities for financing healthcare innovations including a number of challenge funds, hackathons, innovation incubation and accelerator funds, as well as impact investors. While the fundamental architecture and drivers of healthcare innovation do exist in Kenya, there are ecosystem challenges that inhibit the seamless movement of promising solutions along the continuum from ideation to sustainable scale. The existence of a vibrant network of actors in the innovation ecosystem provides an excellent opportunity to learn, adapt and improve by drawing on this collective experience.