For the duration of this course, I will be discussing Kenya. My main interest is something in Reproductive Health. Before taking this course, I already had background knowledge of some of the health disparities in reproductive health in Kenya. 

To begin, there are economic issues in Kenya. 43.4% of Kenya’s population lives on less than $1.25 a day. There are disparities by household wealth. If we look at health, only 20.3% of the poorest 20%  of people have a skilled attendant at birth. While 81.4 of the richest 20% have a skilled attendant at birth. This trend continues are we look into women’s health. Only 43.8 of women have skilled attendant at birth. 

While looking at statistics, it astonished me that only 45.5% of women ages 15-49 use contraception compared to the USA where 78.6% of women ages 15-49 use contraception. We can see why this may be as we look at education in Kenya. For most of us, our sex education comes from school. But for children in Kenya, this is not the case. For males, the net enrollment in primary school is 83.5% and for females it is 84.5%. However, there is drastic drop as children reach secondary school. The data shows that only  51.6% of males are attending secondary school and only 48.4% of females. However, good things are happening in Kenya. The under 5 mortality rate has reduced 34% since 2000. In 1970, the life expectancy in Kenya was 52.2 and in 2012 it jumped to 61.1. 

There are disparities in urban vs rural communities in Kenya.  If we look at health disparities, we can see a drastic difference between urban and rural populations. For women in urban areas, 74.8% have a skilled attendant at birth. For women in rural areas, only 36.8% of women have a skilled attendant at birth. If we look at education, we see that urban areas have a primary school attendance ratio of 80.6 and rural areas have a primary school attendance of 72.5.

Overall, I look forward to learning more about Kenya and the data was very surprising to me. 

Source:https://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/kenya_statistics.html#118