By Ibrahim Alubala

Save the Children continues to ensure children participate in decision making and that their voices are heard during this COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted a ‘pulse check’ to collect the views/feelings of children on the pandemic and reached out to more than 300 children in all our areas of operation. It is impressive that children had a fairly good understanding of COVID-19 how it is caused and how to protect themselves. Most of the children that we interviewed were concerned about the continuity of their education and hoped that they would have an opportunity to resume their education. So far we have used the views of children to inform our advocacy documents including the memorandum to the Ministry of Education (MoE) task formed committee on reopening of schools in Kenya and also during a joint media briefing by 6 country directors for child focused agencies under the banner of Joining Forces Alliance for children in Kenya. We are also using the views from the children to inform our own programming particularly on the COVID-19 response.

Save the Children continues to influence the budget making process as well as the legislative process in the country on the COVID-19 response. In this regard,

a) Save the Children working with HENNET submitted a Memorandum to one of our target counties, Bungoma, where we advocated for the need for the sub national government to revise the county budgets and allocate 8 Million USD for various COVID-19 response activities among them to ensure that the provision of routine child health care services are not compromised during this period. The county assembly will be considering this when they come back from recess in the first week of June. We are also advocating for budget re-alignment for non-essential budgets by developing memoranda in 4 target counties to push for allocation for the COVID-19 response.

b) In Wajir County, working with the Wajir County Child Rights Network (CRN) we strongly recommended the need to create and scale up social protection measures, programs and policies that connect families to life saving health care and nutrition and most importantly support for food rations to the most vulnerable households. The county assembly has approved a supplementary budget that allocates USD 300,000 to assist vulnerable households within the county. The distribution of food rations to 20,000 poorest families, will go a long way in cushioning poor household as proposed in our memo. We shall also use this to continuously lobby for budgetary allocations to emergency response initiatives even beyond the pandemic., The supplementary budget has also made provision for improving health facilities within the county including setting up of ICU facilities within the local public hospital.

c) We submitted a memorandum on our position to the Senate, and will reach out to targeted members of Parliament. The Memo to Senate included the analysis of the impact of the pandemic to children and families in Kenya as well our key suggestions for consideration in this crisis. The memo identifies 5 overarching concerns to children including:

1. Challenges on access to routine basic health services
2. Increased child protection risks
3. Disruption to education
4. Lost family income/livelihoods and resultant food insecurity; and
5. Potential economic slowdown