Het zijn drukke tijden voor de medewerkers van het OMA-project. Lees hieronder hoe de herregistratie van de begunstigden de medewerkers bezig houdt (in het Engels).

RE-REGISTRATION OF BENEFICIARIES

It has been busy at Wakonyu office in the last few weeks, and it will be like that for the next six months.

We are currently updating the information of our beneficiaries (re-registration of all Wakonyu beneficiaries). We started to prepare for that in January and really took off early February. At that moment we had almost 300 families in our care. Most families were registered in or soon after 2008, the year that Wakonyu was founded.

This was decided after we realized that there are a number of beneficiaries who are no longer using their NHIF card either because they have died or they have relocated elsewhere. Also many changes have taken place within those families; orphans in 2008 may be adults by now. But we often don’t know.

Aerial View of Pandi Pieri Catholic Centre

Previously Wakonyu tried to update its family registration though it was only partly successful, because finding the people is not an easy task. Municipal population registration and Kisumu slum areas don’t have street names addresses or house numbers and depend on locators. Even the community representatives of the different areas of Pandipieri know roughly about half of the people in their area.

Contacts with the families happen usually when people are seriously ill and arrive at Wakonyu office for referral to a hospital. That is not the moment to interview them on the family situation and to ask them for relevant documents that confirm the situation. . We had to find another way to contact them. Fortunately approximately 90% of the people use a mobile phone today and we plan to get all mobile contacts as a means of communication.

In January2018 we started going to the Parishes at Sunday morning Mass and collected phone numbers of the Wakonyu beneficiaries we met there. We invite them to come to Wakonyu office to re-register and ask again by calling them. We now have almost 50% of the phone numbers and aim for having connected with and re-registered over 95 % of our beneficiaries by end of May. That will give us the information to build WAKONYU’ registration and create space for new families in urgent need.

Door Pesilah Majiwa & Johan Smorenburg

medewerkers OMA-project