Kenya’s NCD Burden Fuels Call for More Health Resources in Kwale .
By Caroline Katana
The growing burden of non-communicable diseases is putting pressure on Kenya’s health system and households, with stakeholders in Kwale calling for earlier screening, better access to medicines and stronger investment in services closer to patients.
The concerns emerged in Diani during a health stakeholders’ meeting that brought together members of the Kwale County Assembly’s health and budget committees, the Kwale NCD Advocacy Group and NCD Alliance Kenya to discuss the rising burden of diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, cancer and sickle cell disease.
National Ministry of Health statistics presented during the meeting show that non-communicable diseases account for 74 per cent of deaths globally, 37 per cent of deaths in Africa and 43 per cent of deaths in Kenya.
More than half of hospital admissions are also attributed to NCDs.
The national figures identify cardiovascular diseases, cancers and diabetes among the major contributors to the burden.
The Ministry’s data further shows cardiovascular disease mortality at 13.8 per cent, with stroke accounting for 6.1 per cent and ischaemic heart disease 4.6 per cent.
Hypertension prevalence was cited at 23.8 per cent, based on the 2015 STEPS survey.
Diabetes, meanwhile, was reported at a prevalence of 3.1 per cent in 2021, translating to approximately 821,500 people living with the disease, including about 23,000 people with Type 1 diabetes.
About 54 per cent of people with diabetes were estimated to be undiagnosed.
Cancer accounts for about 8 per cent of national mortality and was presented as the second-leading cause of NCD-related deaths.
Among the cancers highlighted were breast, cervical and oesophageal cancers among women, and prostate, oesophageal and colorectal cancers among men.
But beyond the national statistics, health officials and people living with NCDs say the challenge is also being felt in communities where patients struggle to identify symptoms early, access medicines and meet the cost of long-term treatment.
Dr Norine Zecha, who oversees the NCD unit and quality improvement in the Kwale County Department of Health, said many residents may already be living with NCDs without knowing their status.
“Awareness creation is something that has not been done very well. People have these diseases in the rural areas, but they have not been screened and they do not know that it is important to take their medicine, eat healthy food and exercise,” Zecha said.
She said diabetes and hypertension were among the conditions being recorded in significant numbers in county health facilities.
In the 2025/26 period, she said, Kwale recorded about 8,000 new diabetes cases and 23,000 new hypertension cases.
“These are cases that have come to our facilities. There are many more people in the rural areas who have not been identified,” Zecha said.
For the county health department, she said, the challenge is not only getting patients into facilities but ensuring that they can be diagnosed and treated early.
“We need medicines and diagnostics for these diseases so that our patients in Kwale can be identified early and helped early. When someone is identified early and followed up properly, they can live longer and have a life with less pain,” she said.
Zecha said the county also needs to strengthen its health workforce and laboratory capacity while ensuring essential medicines are available.
“We need to make a budget that will provide medicines for these diseases, diagnostics, more doctors and training so that when a patient goes for treatment, they know that treatment is available in Kwale and that our doctors care about this burden of non-communicable diseases,” she said.
For people already diagnosed, access to treatment can determine whether they manage the disease or are forced to make difficult choices between healthcare and other household needs.
Zoena Halfan Hemed, secretary of the Kwale NCD Advocacy Group and a diabetes educator, has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 18 years.
She was eight when she was diagnosed after experiencing excessive thirst and frequent urination.
She said she had lived with the condition for about three years before it was identified.
Today, she said, obtaining insulin and testing supplies remains one of her biggest challenges.
She previously benefited from a programme that provided medicines, glucometers and testing strips to young people, but the support ended once beneficiaries reached 25.
She now has to find money for insulin, food and testing supplies, sometimes doing casual work to keep herself on treatment.
“The challenge is that you have to buy your food, buy your medicine and also buy the strips,” Hemed said.
Hemed said her parents died ,when she was still a small girl. Her mother was diagnosed and lived with Type 2 diabetes .
Her experience also points to the importance of public education, particularly as changing diets
The Ministry of Health presentation linked the wider NCD burden to several risk factors, including changing diets, increased consumption of processed foods and sugar, physical inactivity, overweight and obesity, tobacco and alcohol use, alongside socioeconomic and geographical inequalities.
Zecha said prevention efforts should begin early, with families and schools helping children develop healthier habits.
“We should teach children to eat the foods we used to eat traditionally. We should teach them to eat more vegetables and fruits and reduce foods that are oily, fried and high in sugar,” she said.
She also encouraged physical activity and reduction of alcohol and tobacco use, noting that some risk factors are modifiable while others, such as genetic conditions, cannot be prevented through lifestyle changes.
The meeting also exposed the financial burden NCDs can place on households.
Gideon Ayodo, programme manager at NCD Alliance Kenya, said the cost of NCDs extends beyond the individual patient because prolonged illness can affect an entire household’s ability to meet its basic needs.
He said available data indicates that about half of patients admitted in Level 4 and Level 5 hospitals and above are living with NCDs, illustrating the pressure the diseases place on health facilities.
Ayodo said families can also experience financial hardship when a member requires long-term NCD care.
“If there is one person in a family living with the disease, that family can be pushed into poverty by about 30 per cent,” Ayodo said.
He said the situation underscores the need to move essential NCD services and commodities closer to communities instead of concentrating them at higher-level facilities.
NCD Alliance Kenya, he said, has been working with people living with NCDs, health workers and the Ministry of Health to strengthen advocacy and improve access to services, including work across 24 counties.
“We need to increase resources for NCDs, particularly the provision of commodities at lower-level facilities so that people can access medicines closer to where they live,” Ayodo said.
The same concern was raised by Tumaini Kasim Mwachaunga, MCA for Gombato Bongwe and deputy chairperson of the County Assembly health committee, who said patients sometimes have to travel long distances to access medicines.
“There are medicines that cannot be found in facilities in the rural areas. A patient may have to travel and spend more than Sh1,000 to seek treatment,” Mwachaunga said.
He said the County Assembly should play a role in ensuring that policies and legislation support the distribution of medicines to lower-level facilities.
For Manza Beja, MCA for Mwereni Ward and chairperson of the County Assembly finance committee, the meeting highlighted a gap between the burden of NCDs and the attention given to them.
“Someone with cancer was treated as if it was their own disease. Someone with hypertension, it was treated as their personal problem,” Beja said, arguing that NCDs require greater public awareness and structured government attention.
Beja said legislation could also provide a framework for establishing dedicated services for people living with particular chronic conditions.
“If the law says that these people should be served in a certain way and at a certain place, it becomes easier to establish special units for people with such diseases,” he said.
He cited sickle cell disease as one condition where better identification of patients could help health planners understand the scale of the problem and plan services accordingly.
The call for better planning was also echoed by Juma Ali, MCA for Tiwi Ward, who said NCDs are already affecting residents across the county.
“The diseases are there. We live with them,” Ali said.
He said early screening could help reduce the financial and health consequences associated with delayed diagnosis, particularly for conditions such as cancer and diabetes.
The stakeholders said prevention and treatment therefore need to work together: communities need information and screening, while health facilities need medicines, diagnostics, trained personnel and systems capable of supporting patients over the long term.
Kenya has already developed policies, strategies, guidelines and frameworks addressing NCD prevention and treatment, cancer care, primary healthcare, emergency continuity of care and patient support.
The discussion in Kwale, however, focused on translating those national commitments into services that patients can actually access closer to home.
For Zecha, that begins with taking screening beyond the hospital.
“Patients should come to our dispensaries and make sure they are screened. They should also be screened through the community health promoters,” she said.
Ayodo similarly urged leaders to treat the NCD burden as a planning and resource issue, while encouraging young people to reduce exposure to risk factors such as tobacco, alcohol and vaping.
The message from the Diani meeting was therefore less about one disease than about a health system facing a growing group of chronic conditions—many of which require patients to remain in care for years.
As the national statistics show the scale of the problem, experiences shared by residents and health workers in Kwale point to the practical questions that follow: how early are people being diagnosed, how far must they travel for treatment, and whether the medicines and diagnostic services they need .
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