In 2018 Ageing Concern Foundation was founded out of desire to enrich livelihoods of vulnerable older persons. The founder, was supporting senior citizens within his community and after realizing the gaps in the protection of older persons rights and addressing of issues related to older persons, he extended the interventions to the county and later to other counties. This led to increased partnerships and established memberships with key institutions scaling up interventions to the national level.

Kenya’s rapidly increasing population of older people (OP), 60+ suffers disproportionately high levels of inequitable access to healthy ageing services to address the triple burden of communicable diseases, non-communicable diseases, and injuries which are most prevalent in older age. This is despite government rolling out Universal Health Coverage (UHC). Older people incur out of pocket expenses which impoverish them. The health services offered are disease oriented and therefore not appropriate for healthy ageing needs. The services are also neither person-centred, nor integrated. There is no full continuum of UHC services from health promotion and disease prevention to early diagnosis and treatment, rehabilitation, specialist, Long-Term Care, and palliative care. This is considered indirect discrimination and prevents older people from enjoying their right to health as contemplated by both the Constitution of Kenya (CoK) 2010, and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Critical opportunities to prevent or delay the onset of more acute and complicated care needs and to support for older people’s health, wellbeing and quality of life, are missed. The very goal of UHC, leaving no-one behind in accessing needed health services without experiencing financial burden, remains elusive for older people. Only 5% of older people enrolled in the universal pension scheme (Inua Jamii) who are also eligible for the pension scheme, are currently enrolled for the complementary NHIF scheme. Older persons still carry financial incurred due to out-of-pocket expenses for medicines for chronic diseases and assistive devices. In addition, the health sector lacks national clinical guidelines on geriatric care and formal training in care for older persons with just a handful of community health volunteers trained on healthy ageing and older persons’ health. There is need therefore for a systems wide reorientation to align with the healthy ageing needs.

The 2019 UNGA high level political declaration on UHC and the scaled up of UHC to all the 47 counties in Kenya after the pilot in four counties are two strategic shifts that make this project timely. Kenya has addressed lack of policies and strategies on UHC by the development of various Policies and Strategies including, the UHC Policy, Health Financing Strategy, Human Resources for Health Strategy, Internship Policy, community Health Policy and Strategy, Primary Health Care Framework, Kenya Heath Sector Partnership, and Coordination Framework. The country also recently developed a ‘National Healthy Ageing and Older People’s Health Strategy’ and a Healthy Ageing and Older People’s Health Strategy’ training manual for Community Health Volunteers to strengthen capacity of level 1 of the health system.