RIGHT 5 Funding Outcomes Announced

With Kenya continuing to experience extreme weather and events exacerbated by climate change, our researchers led by Benjamin Tsofa from KEMRI- Wellcome and Jacob Macknight from Oxford University will be working on a project focused on enhancing Health Systems resilience through vulnerability and risk mapping to facilitate climate risk mitigation planning.

The project funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and named A Novel Extreme Weather Risk Insurance System for Kenya (NEWRISK)” will focus on using the latest methods to provide focused data on extreme weather, population vulnerability, and health system capacity readiness  across various climatic zones in Kenya.

“Extreme weather events in the country due to climate change are increasingly having a big impact to population health and the health system capacity in the country. Am glad that as a research Programme, we can leverage on our unique capacity in health policy and systems research, epidemiology and population health, community engagement, and health economics to address this important emerging health challenge. Am grateful to the NIHR for the generous funding support to enable us to undertake this work”. Dr. Tsofa added.

The project will further aim to estimate population vulnerabilities to extreme weather events based on where people live, across the different climatic zones; and develop a tool to assess health facilities’ readiness for extreme weather and then use this tool to measure the readiness of public health facilities across Kenya. The project will further analyse the interactions between extreme weather, population vulnerability, and the health system readiness. Finally, the project will use various health economics methods to estimate the costs of doing nothing, and the costs and risks associated with multiple protective strategies. 

NEWRISK is among seven other projects focusing on healthcare in the context of extreme weather events that were recently funded through the NIHR’s Research and Innovation for Global Health Transformation (RIGHT) programme. (https://www.nihr.ac.uk/news/nihr-awards-over-20-million-for-global-health-research-projects-focused-on-extreme-weather-challenges/35425.

Cover photo credit: ILRI/ Camille Hanotte