Summary
This case study describes the process for developing a Healthy Ageing and Older Persons' Health Strategy 2022–2026 for Kenya. The strategy acknowledges that aging is a progressive biological process that begins at conception and is influenced by our environment, our behavior, and our inherent individual habits and characteristics. Interactions between these inherent or intrinsic personal characteristics or capacities and their environments define how people age. The interaction between the environment and individual factors determines whether an individual experiences healthy ageing (developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables well-being to be and do what one values) in older age or otherwise.
Planning and Implementation
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What was the challenge you were trying to address?
The unavailability of older persons' health services and the unresponsiveness of the care systems persist despite the growing population of older adults in the country. Further, the invisibility of older persons and lack of information among older persons continues to be an issue in Kenya.
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Who were you trying to impact?
Older people in general, Both older and younger people
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What sectors were you targeting?
Health
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Who else was involved?
Government, Civil Society Organization, Older People's Association, Academia, Health Care, Social Care
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How did older people participate?
Older people were consulted during the planning process
Lessons learned
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Please describe how collaboration worked in your initiative.
The civil society supported the development of the strategy while the other stakeholders contributed and supported the strategy to completion.
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What was the impact of your initiative on older people, their families, and/or their communities?
This strategy is in its first year of implementation, however, we have seen an increase in awareness of older persons' needs among the community health volunteers who were engaged in the dissemination of the strategy and trained.
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What issues did you face, and how did you address them?
Older persons were involved in all the meetings that were conducted and they actively participated in shaping the strategy. However, we had a challenge bringing people together to work on the development of the strategy, as such we worked with a technical working group whose membership we maintained to the very end of the process. The importance of this was that there was consistency in the information and easy progress. Due to the scarcity of resources, this process took a long time to conclude, but with the engagement of various stakeholders, we were able to mobilise resources that saw the successful completion of the strategy.
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What lessons did you learn from implementing this initiative?
Involving older persons is crucial to the success of ownership and implementation; there is need for data that can be used to initiate conversations, advocate for the prioritisation of older persons' needs; there is a need to be intentional in building the capacity of older persons to champion healthy ageing and of younger people to understand healthy ageing.
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Do you have any other reflections you would like to share?
N/A