SMILES PROJECT – KHAUNGA HEALTH CENTRE, MUMIAS EAST SUB-COUNTY
Robert Simiyu Batata is a nurse by profession, and he will tell you plainly what Khaunga Health Centre looked like before SMILES came. Attendance at the maternal and child health clinic was low. Mothers were delivering at home rather than at the facility. Newly employed community health promoters had never been trained. The Community Health Committee had quietly collapsed, with no partner paying attention to it, and with morale hollowed out from neglect.
“We had several challenges in service delivery,” Robert says. “Some of our qualified staff had not been trained in emergency care or newborn resuscitation. Some CHPs who replaced those who had left had never received any training at all. The CHP is the link between the facility and the community. If that link is broken, everything suffers.”
SMILES — a health systems strengthening project supported through ADS Western — came in and began rebuilding, methodically and respectfully. They trained healthcare workers across the facility and neighbouring communities. They revived and formally trained the Community Health Committees for the two community units attached to Khaunga. They established a Work Improvement Team, a structured group that meets monthly and quarterly to analyse which health indicators are lagging and why.
Crucially, SMILES began providing stipends to Community Health Promoters through the monthly meetings — a small investment with an outsized effect on motivation. With morale restored, CHPs started conducting home visits again, identifying defaulters, facilitating referrals, and escorting first-time antenatal mothers to the facility.
The results have been striking. At the last review, Khaunga had been ranked last in Mumias East Sub-County. Now it is second. Maternal deaths, which stood at one when the programme began, have since dropped to zero. Neonatal deaths have reduced. And Robert has set his team a new target: number one.
“When we began our partnership with SMILES, we had one maternal death. As of now, we have none.”
— Robert Simiyu Batata, Nurse-in-Charge, Khaunga Health Centre
