Water-tight checks at Kemsa will curb loss of funds
Edward Njoroge
We’ve oversight frameworks to guard against loss of funds via procurement process manipulation
The past few weeks have been a pretty busy season for Kenya Medical Supplies Authority (Kemsa) staffing teams running against time to meet customer orders and deliveries.
Due to the budget cycles, county governments have recently placed orders, settled outstanding debts and shared their Health Products and Technologies (HPTs) procurement needs.
At Kemsa, we haven’t been caught by surprise as we have done proper supply chain forecasting and planning to meet clients’ needs.
As the finance bill was sailing through the National Assembly, we were busy facilitating procurement and warehouse stocking to enable us to meet the county governments needs once the funds were disbursed.
Every year, we gain more experience on this front, and it’s no wonder then that this year, we have maintained a more than 99 per cent order fulfilment rate.
Our vast experience in last-mile supply solutions has also come in handy as we progressively continue to deliver consignments.
At the recent Kitui county consignment flag off, I had an excellent occasion to engage Governor Charity Ngilu on our operations.
To great detail, my colleagues and I updated her on the quality assurance reforms, information technology improvements and globally benchmarked systems that we have adopted to ensure efficient service delivery and turnaround times.
As envisaged in the Big Four agenda, we were clear Kemsa has to play a part in establishing and maintaining partnerships that promote better health outcomes.
It remains committed to achieving excellence in procurement, warehousing and distribution of quality, affordable HPTs to public health facilities.
By far, Kemsa is very well-positioned to contribute to attaining Universal Health Coverage (UHC) goals.
The government has invested heavily in ensuring it success, as evidenced by the intensive capital investments pumped in state of the art Embakasi Supply Chain Centre.
The facility allows Kemsa to efficiently meet clients’ needs and sustain last-mile HPTs delivery countrywide.
Under a dedicated operating model fine-tuned to ensure on-time supply of crucial medical supplies, the authority provides prompt deliveries to more than 8,000 public health centres in all counties.
Perhaps unknown to many, Kemsa performs one of the most complex supply chain management jobs well above private sector benchmarks.
Indeed, all County governments can rest assured Kemsa has the necessary capacity to service all placed orders for delivery within a week.
Within our reform plan, we have activated supplier performance measurement tools to raise the quality standards to world-class benchmarks and ensure value for money to the taxpayer.
Having undertaken extensive integrity adjustments, prospective suppliers to the authority are required to maintain very high ethical operating standards.
Indeed, we have re-engineered our financial management and procurement processes and adopted information technology systems.
This ensures we achieve excellence by providing critical assurance of ethical conduct to all stakeholders.
We have instituted oversight frameworks to guard against the loss of taxpayers and donor funds through procurement processes manipulation. — The writer is the acting Chief Executive Officer at Kemsa
