Bungoma’s Blood Donation Advocate and Ambassador

The First Lady of Bungoma County Mrs. Caroline Wangamati on her drive to ensure better healthcare in the county and her passion for blood donation

The distinguished First Lady of Bungoma County, Her Excellency Mrs. Caroline Wangamati is one of the front runners for public health in her county. She has spearheaded several projects in different parts of the county, including the empowerment of peripheral health facilities to enable accessibility to proper health care and has strongly advocated for increasing the blood bank in the county and Kenya. As she passionately speaks about her ardent desire to save lives through voluntary and regular blood donation especially by adults, we see the love and care of a mother in her towards her people. Caroline proves to be an iron lady obligated with the duty of proper service delivery to her people – the citizens of Bungoma County and Kenya as a whole.

HCA:  Please tell us a bit about yourself.

Caroline: I am Caroline Wangamati, and I have had the honor to serve as the First Lazy for Bungoma County for the last four years. As a First Lady I have been involved very strongly in matters pertaining to maternal and child health.

HCA: Why are most First Ladies including the first lady of Kenya quite involved in health matters?

Caroline: When you think of a common Kenyan citizen, one of the one of the challenges that has constantly remained unsolved is their health, partly caused by financial constraints. We are a lower income country, so we haven’t put sufficient money into health and most people struggle to access the healthcare that they need.

As such we do not have equity in access to care in the best hospitals or health facilities and mostly a lot of people in the rural parts of Kenya don’t have the access as you and I do.

So, you find that as a First Lady, while your husband is busy worrying about improvement of infrastructure and all that, what comes naturally is the health of your people. How are your mothers? How are your children? It is an area that automatically draws you because it is a human story, a social story and it captivates your heart. And if you cannot get the people to be healthy then there’s no productivity you will get from them. I think that’s why most First Ladies go for health – be it cancer, teenage pregnancy, child immunization or maternal health.

HCA: You are sitting in a very interesting position where you can influence and at the same time have access to lots of information about your county. Tell us about Bungoma County and the challenges of health, and specifically where blood challenges access is.

Caroline: Bungoma County is the fifth most populated county after Nairobi, Kakamega, Nakuru and Kiambu. Earlier when health was not devolved, government policy did not take into consideration the various access issues in different corners of the county.

In Bungoma County, for instance, a mother that is trying to give birth in Mount Elgon faces very different challenges compared to a mother trying to give birth in Bumula, which are in the same county. One of the things I highly celebrate about devolution is that it has given the chance for a particular governor for a particular county to address the various health challenges in the area. For example, access to health care in Mount Elgon, which has a terrain issue and Bumula, which has a poverty issue require very different approaches. Hence, the governor is able to look at the problems differently and sort them out accordingly.

When I first got very close to this story, I realized that we have centered all our care in one big facility in the county and not empowered the peripheral facilities. Take maternal care for instance – most women give birth at night or on weekends and thus they need to access the health facility during these times. When they go to the referral hospital in the county, they find it congested but the peripheral facilities are more or less idle.

My advice is that if we would like to offer easy access to health care in a county, we must strengthen the peripheral facilities and make sure they can offer emergency care to mothers.

So far, I’m very proud because we have been able to install theatres in six of the nine hospitals in the county and they are now able to attend to maternal emergencies.

From where I sit, there is still room to do more but we are on a Very good trajectory and I want to Congratulate the Kenya National Blood Transfusion Service.

Caroline Wangamati

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When I think about blood, blood was not devolved because it is an essential and a sensitive product. You need to think quality and make sure that you are not spreading diseases through blood instead of saving lives, so I fully understand the decision around not devolving blood supply in Kenya but it is still an essential commodity. The national number of postpartum hemorrhage mortalities was at 40% and in my county, it was at 50% at the time we took leadership.

Therefore, as the First Lady I didn’t have a choice in advocating for blood as an essential commodity in saving lives. It was instinctive and natural for me to go into the blood space to make sure we have sufficient blood in our county. I have gone to schools, markets, street barazas to speak about blood because availability of sufficient blood starts with you and me actually donating blood. Most people only donate blood while in high school, which is very bad.

HCA: You’ve done some work in terms of enabling more people to donate blood in your county, talk to us about that.

Caroline: Blood starts with a donor, and I have always believed that somebody needs to inform the potential donor that it is good to donate the blood. A lot of adults walking around in this country don’t know that they are having a life-saving product in their bodies.

So, we first need to tell people because every time I have spoken to someone who doesn’t know about this they are surprised and say, “Why hasn’t anyone told me that?” We can’t manufacture blood; it has to come from you to me in a particular process. But you need to explain to someone that if they donate blood, it could help another person who could bleed to death. Secondly, because people are busy, someone needs to remind them to come in and donate some blood and that they can come with two or three other friends.

What we have tried to do in the county is to mobilize people, be it through football or other ways. These initiatives are very powerful in rural areas, including the very popular radio greetings clubs in western Kenya. Our target donor is a mature adult who is able to give consent to be a regular donor and not just high school donors, who are minors. In Bungoma I think we have tried – I was very impressed: in one of the months, we moved from 2% non-school donors to 68% and I was very proud.

I also like the support from the national government because they are giving us the consumables more regularly. We receive the blood bags and refreshments on time and we are able to do more outreach and get in more blood. From where I sit, there is still room to do more but we are on a very good trajectory and I want to congratulate the Kenya National Blood Transfusion Service because they have done a good job.

Looking at the numbers today, we are almost hitting 300,000 donors and as a country we should be targeting 450,000 which is about 1% of the national population. I see us getting there with the work that’s being done and it is just working on the donor management, trying to get more donors, retaining the ones we have, trying to recruit the adult donors and moving away from the high school children who are not able to give consent and who only are donating because of the soda and the loaf of bread provided.

HCA: Figures from the KNBTS indicate that for the first time Kenya managed to surpass the target of blood donations, without donor money. It is really impressive that we could achieve this milestone!

Caroline: Absolutely! It gives me so much hope because for the first time we even surpassed the numbers we attained when we had PEPFAR funding. This tells us we can do it: we are sustainable and with consistent effort, we can have sufficient blood for our population. It will be our own solution and that’s what always makes me a very proud African girl, that we can do it ourselves, for our own people. And you should use the loud people like myself to pass on this message. I cannot donate blood because my kilos are never right but I’m very loud at this because again, if we put out champions that can attract people into it, it’s going to make a huge difference.

HCA: And those champions are not, like you said just political leaders?

Caroline: Yes! In fact, personally I think you and I are too old to be champions. We need the cool kids on the streets.

We need the musicians, the religious leaders. I would love to get the boda-boda (motorcycle) riders because leadership is not about political leadership, leadership cuts across all spheres. And let’s get champions from all these spheres and anybody who can do advocacy. I would love governors to take up advocacy, they don’t have to be donors themselves but they can talk about it. I would love the President to speak about it!

We need to saturate the media with stories about blood because most people are not informed that they need to donate blood and we need to try and get them to know that its good and important to donate blood.

This feature appeared in the June 2022 issue of Healthcare Middle East & Africa. You can read this and the entire magazine HERE