gmeltdown

Today I had this nice opportunity to partially attend a PEPFAR partners meeting at the Safari Park Hotel. I shall not assume it is obvious that  PEPFAR  stands for (United States) President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Kenya is said to be one of the countries with the biggest allocation of PEPFAR grants, largely through USAID and CDC . Every year, billions of Kenya Shillings are handled as grants from PEPFAR within the country, so much so that it is almost a sub-economy in itself. PEPFAR, essentially the philanthropy of the American People appears so immense in the health sector that the aid should ideally overflow to the ICT sector through eHealth. For more on related development dynamics see my earlier post on who really are our genuine development partners . Over time, PEPFAR leadership may have discovered that it is not possible to practice philanthropy in the air - it has to be in someone's jurisdiction -  who needs to care that they Americans ...

It has been said, quite often that there is by far more talk about national paperwork on everything development than actual execution of development agenda in Kenya. Such paperwork will be called national strategy, national policy, national plan of operations, national assessment, national report and everything else national that can be put on paper. Of course developing the paperwork requires consensus building , which in turn requires government officers, bi lateral partners, UN bodies, solution vendors among other stakeholders to deliberate and dine in exotic hotels. The stakeholder meetings will be called workshops, seminars, conferences, trainings, and any other name that represents a group of privileged people who do not normally meet at their routine work places to say the same things over and over again. Needless to say, participants of such meetings also have to draw a handsome allowance to facilitate the temporary displacement from their normal work station. The stak...