Kenusa is a social enterprise that hopes to expand renal care to underserved populations. The current challenge we face in Kenya, as well as in East Africa in general, is that most of the dialysis units that exist are in large cities and towns, meaning many patients have to travel hundreds of kilometers to get treatment. Because of this, they often miss sessions because they can't afford the transport costs. Our approach is to partner with mission hospitals that are already located in underserved communities to offer dialysis so that we can bring dialysis closer to the underserved population.
Our pioneer hospital is Fatima Mission Hospital. We are the only dialysis unit in Rongai. There are only four units in Kajiado County and we are the largest. We are strategically located because a lot of people from Kajiado North have to pass through Rongai to go to treatment centres in town. We are also in touch with other hospitals to try and duplicate this approach.
We have recently been selected to be in the accelerator program. So that's exciting for us. Secondly, we're celebrating our second year of operation in August. That's a win for us as well.
One of the challenges is that dialysis in Kenya is very expensive. Most patients can't afford it, and they have to use the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF), which covers it at 100%, which is good for the patient. But unfortunately, they're very slow in remitting payments. We offer the dialysis treatment and then bill NHIF. Sometimes the gap between when you bill and you actually get the remittance can be several months, which makes cash flow an issue. We have to reach into our pockets to continue operations.
For us, one of the things we have needed to do is adapt from a different environment of healthcare. There's a lot of oversight, and things happen a certain way, which made us think that we could come and replicate the same thing here, not knowing that things on the ground are different. Because of this, we had to be very flexible and adaptable to the environment, to change our plans and implementations to adapt solutions that work here. So it's being able to be adaptable, and to identify that what works for one patient might not work for another.
The experience has been great! They have been our mentors and advisors. They've helped us with our networking and more. Being that cash flow has been our biggest issue, we've received some grants that have really helped our operations. We've kept the place going with all that support that we have received from them. Being mentored by Villgro Africa has helped us systematically think through how our model is structured. We would never have thought through that process had we not had the influence. To us, that value is incalculable.