For Kenya, the year 2012 was marked with a good number of industrial strikes. The most conspicuous strikes were the teachers’, lecturers’, nurses’ and the doctors’, not undermining the go slow by the chiefs and administration police. The rising cost of living had largely contributed to the strikes. About 2,300 members of the doctors’ union had stopped working after the government said it could not meet their demands for a 300 percent pay rise. Most patients in public hospitals were left unattended and sadly some lost their lives. Some hospitals had hired consultants to replace the striking doctors, but these were still not enough. Private hospitals and clinics however, remained opened as usual and attended to their patients.
On the other hand, about 200,000 teachers were demanding a wage increase of between 100% and 300% after the government had offered nearly 4% pay rise. The Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) and the Kenya Union of Post Primary Education Teachers (KUPPET) were demanding a 300 percent salary increment for their members, alongside responsibility allowance at 50 percent, 40 percent and 30 percent for principals and their deputies, senior teachers and heads of departments respectively. The strike had such a huge impact that it altered the annual Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) and Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) examinations schedule.
Can technology help the overworked and underpaid teachers, nurses and doctors to provide their essential services? Kenya’s public health sector is facing important challenges that it needs to deal with such as increasing patient loads in public hospitals, a widespread shortage of qualified medical professionals, inequitable distribution of medical resources and the rising cost of providing medical care. Technology can be used to tackle some of these challenges. For instance, health presence is a set up that utilizes communication and collaboration platforms and lets patients interact with doctors hundreds of kilometers away within a clinical setting. In this setup, a qualified medical nurse gathers and transmits physiological data to a specialist doctor from which the doctor can make a prescription or decide the next course of action. With doctors and consultants sitting at Kenyatta National Hospital, the set up can help deliver medical to remote hospitals such as Marsabit where their skills might be rare but will have the availability of a nurse and a clinic with basic facilities.
In the education, the challenges are similar; shortages of teachers staff, overcrowded classes, static learning content and marginalization of semi-arid areas. More than bridging the gap of the students to teachers’ ratio, technology can make learning fun for both teachers and students. Various set ups can be deployed to allow students to share the same teacher or lecturer from one location to more than one classroom. When technology is used for distance learning, students can be face to face with other students a world away exposing them to experiences they would have never had before. This would enhance inter-university collaboration and research leading to innovation and fun learning. Colleges and universities can also bring in experts onto campus for classroom presentations, guest lectures, workshops, and other academic pursuits without their physical presence or considering the geographical distance. Considering that the lectures or lessons are delivered using video, this content can easily be stored for future reference or retrieval by other students or lecturers.
Some countries in the world have embraced technology to provide public services. In India, 60 per cent of the population resides in the rural areas. People living in these areas did not have access to the same quality of medical health care as in urban areas. A health presence solution helped bridge the gap. For some patients, everything from routine appointments to follow-up visits after a major surgery were too expense and inconveniencing to bear. Travel time for physicians and patients would take long hours or may not be fruitful at all. A study by KPMG estimated that India has approximately 12 hospital beds and just 6 doctors for every 10,000 patients, while Kenya has a doctor-to-patient ratio of one doctor for every 17,000 patients. The World Health Organisation recommends of one doctor for every 1,000 patients. Would Kenya deploy such technology to cater for the deficit?
Research and education requires relations between different institutes, research organizations, technology partners, and government departments. In the US, the National LambdaRail (NLR) was developed to provide of high-speed nationwide optical networking services for member research organizations, similar to Kenya’s Kenya Education Network (KENET). NLR enabled has enabled access to video conferencing services for anyone with access to the national facility. The facility has assisted in universities in the US to hold telepresence sessions with abroad such as in April, 2009 with the Khalifa University for Science, Technology and Research (KUSTAR) in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Through KENET, Kenya can take similar strides and lecturers from the main universities can be delivered to constituent colleges and campus. This will reduce the work load on lecturers and improve the lecturer to student ratio, virtually.
