WHO Kenya Country Office · Annual Report 2025
A year of elimination, campaigns and county reach
Kenya eliminated sleeping sickness, vaccinated 16.7 million children against typhoid in its largest-ever campaign, and ran its first mpox vaccination drive. Yet newborn mortality stalled and a 92% shortage of doctors persisted. Explore where WHO worked, county by county.
Source: WHO Kenya Country Office Annual Report 2025 (World Health Organization, 2025)
Explore · 47 counties
WHO programme footprint
Falling
Under-five mortality has fallen from 115 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2003 to 41 in 2022. But newborn mortality has stagnated at 21 per 1,000 and now accounts for nearly half of all under-five deaths, about 30,000 newborns a year, four every hour.
−64%Under-5, 2003 to 2022
WHO programme footprint
Counties by number of named WHO activities
Only counties the 2025 report names explicitly. Click a bar to spotlight it on the map.
Programmes that covered all 47 counties
Nationwide work is excluded from the county counts on the left.
Cluster 1
Health promotion, disease prevention and control
2025 achievementsPeople reached by 2025 vaccination campaigns
Logarithmic scale. Campaigns ranged from 10,697 people to 16.7 million children.
Immunisation coverage against the 90% mark
Routine and campaign coverage reported for 2025. The dashed line marks 90%.
Annual burden: cases and deaths
Latest annual estimates cited in the report. Logarithmic scale.
HIV: Kenya against the UNAIDS 95-95-95 targets
1.36 million people are on antiretroviral therapy. Kenya clears the diagnosis and treatment targets; viral suppression sits one point below.
Child malnutrition, children under five
Stunting has fallen from 40% in 1993 to 18% in 2022, but the county gap is fourfold.
Stunting: widest county gap
Percentage of children under five who are stunted, KDHS 2022. National average 18%.
Only the counties the report names unambiguously are charted. Its sentence reads: “Kilifi 37%, West 34%, Pokot 31, and Samburu 31% have the highest percentages while Kisumu 9% and Garissa 9% have the lowest.” Kenya has no county called West or Pokot, only West Pokot, so one high-burden county cannot be identified from the text and is left off rather than guessed at.
Milestones
Elimination and control in 2025
Cluster 2
Health emergencies: preparedness and response
Mpox outbreak since July 2024
948 confirmed cases and 13 deaths, a case fatality rate of 1.4%. Status as of March 2026.
807 people have recovered. The remaining 128 cases were still in follow-up or had an unreported outcome at the time of the report.
Surveillance activity in 2025
Active case finding across priority diseases. Logarithmic scale.
Laboratory turnaround times collapse
The upgraded KEMRI genomic laboratory brought poliovirus confirmation home from Atlanta.
The laboratory now serves Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Djibouti, Eritrea and Yemen. The first pair is the report's own measure, 40 days down to under 10. The second comes from a KEMRI officer quoting a range of three to six weeks; the bar shows three, the shortest of that range, so the improvement is not overstated.
Health workers trained in 2025
Training reached from national laboratory staff to community health promoters.
The emergency year
Preparedness milestones and outbreak response, 2025.
Two cholera outbreaks, two pictures
The report gives two cuts of the 2025 cholera burden.
The long-rains figures count suspected cases reported by May 2025 across Nairobi, Kisumu, Migori and Kwale. The year-end figure counts confirmed cases across both outbreaks; all 241 patients were treated and discharged by November 2025.
Cluster 3
Health systems and services
The workforce gap
Kenya has doubled its health workforce to nearly 190,000 in a decade, yet the shortfall is severe.
The report gives one numeric WHO benchmark, 10 per 10,000 for doctors, against an actual 2.6. For nurses it says only that 22.3 per 10,000 is “meeting WHO standards” and for facilities that 2.4 per 10,000 “exceeds the WHO standard”, without stating either figure, so no reference bar is drawn for them.
Health worker density against WHO standards
Per 10,000 population. The report states a numeric WHO ratio for doctors only.
Sexual and reproductive health indicators
Coverage is high on paper, but maternal mortality remains at 355 per 100,000 live births.
Child survival: progress and stagnation
Deaths per 1,000 live births. Under-five mortality has fallen by 64% between the two survey years the report cites.
The report gives only two under-five figures, KDHS 2003 and 2022, so the dashed line joins two observed points rather than tracing a measured path; the real decline was not necessarily steady. No 2003 newborn figure is given, so newborn mortality is plotted at its 2022 level alone. Its stagnation is the report's statement, which two points cannot themselves show.
Financing and coverage
Kenya's route to universal health coverage by 2030.
Primary health care requires a 3.7-fold increase in investment to meet national targets.
Cold chain coverage lifted
Over 2,000 cold-chain units distributed to all 47 counties in 2025.
Systems
What changed in 2025
Cluster 4
Partnerships, leadership and outlook
Top 10 donors, 2025
Share of WHO Kenya Country Office funding as published in the report.
The report's own labels total 91%; the residual 9% is not attributed to a named donor in the published figure.
Partner coordination
The Health Sector Partner Coordination unit's 2025 output.
Development Partners in Health/Kenya grew by 11% in 2025, welcoming five new members, mostly private foundations, to reach 42. The H6 platform aligning six UN agencies on reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health was revived.
Leadership reflections
How the country office adapted
Watchpoints
Where progress is fragile
Analysis
Seven findings from the 2025 report
Read against the source1
Immunisation coverage collapses after the first birthday
Penta3 reaches 89% at 14 weeks. The second measles-rubella dose at 18 months reaches about 50%. The gap of roughly 39 points opens precisely where the schedule asks families to return for a visit after the first year, and the report states that every vaccine given after the first year of life stays below 80%.
Routine coverage by point in the schedule
The dashed line marks the 80% floor the report says later doses fall below.
What the gap costs
Measles resurgence alongside an ageing campaign cycle.
2,118
measles cases reported in 2025, with outbreaks persisting since 2021
2016
the last nationwide measles follow-up campaign, nine years before this report
39 pts
drop between Penta3 at 14 weeks and measles-rubella dose 2 at 18 months
The July 2025 campaign reached 84% for measles-rubella and 87% for typhoid in a single ten-day push. Campaigns are closing gaps that the routine schedule keeps reopening, which is a different and more expensive kind of success. Low second-dose coverage is named in the report as the cause of the population immunity gap.
2
Kenya runs two geographically separate health programmes
Coding every county the report names, the western counties receive disease control, laboratory and digital systems work, while the northern arid counties receive mobile outreach and emergency response. The two modes barely overlap: of activity in the west is systems and disease control, and in the north is outreach and emergency.
Western & Nyanza counties
Named WHO activities by type, 2025.
Northern arid counties
Named WHO activities by type, 2025. Same scale as the panel on the left.
Bungoma, Kakamega, Vihiga and Trans Nzoia receive no outreach or emergency activity at all. Marsabit, Samburu, Tana River, Mandera, Wajir and Garissa receive no systems or disease-control activity at all. This is a coherent division of labour if the burden differs that sharply, and a structural blind spot if it does not.
3
Infrastructure meets the standard while doctors do not
The report says facility density (2.4 per 10,000) exceeds the WHO standard and nurse density (22.3 per 10,000) meets it, but quantifies neither benchmark. It quantifies one: doctors should be 10 per 10,000 and stand at 2.6, a shortfall of 74%. Buildings and nursing capacity are not the binding constraint.
Distance from the stated WHO benchmark
Doctors against the WHO recommended 10 per 10,000, the one benchmark the report quantifies.
The shortfall in context
Kenya has doubled its workforce in a decade and still cannot close this gap.
92%
shortage of doctors against estimated need
46%
shortage of nurses by workload, though density is said to meet the WHO standard
2.4/10k
facility density, which the report says exceeds the WHO standard
The report says nurse density meets the WHO standard and, sixty pages later, that nurses are 46% short of need. Both can be true: the first measures against an international minimum, the second against Kenya's own workload-based requirement, calculated with the Workload Indicators of Staffing Needs across 344 facilities. Only the second reflects what facilities need to run. The report never reconciles them, which is why the same workforce can look adequate on one page and severely short on another.
4
Response intensity is inverted relative to burden
The report records 5,591 travellers screened per confirmed mpox case and 993 people vaccinated per confirmed cholera case, against 0.11 women screened per new cancer case. Cancer kills about 27,000 Kenyans a year. Mpox and cholera together killed 19.
Interventions delivered per case
Logarithmic scale spanning nearly five orders of magnitude.
Deaths a year, same three conditions
The ranking inverts almost exactly.
This is not necessarily misallocation. Outbreaks demand containment on a clock, and screening a traveller is far cheaper than screening for cancer. But the report's headline achievement is eliminating a disease whose last recorded case was in 2009, while the cancer programme reached 5,026 women against 44,700 new cases a year. Elimination milestones are legible and fundable in a way that chronic-disease coverage is not.
5
Child mortality fell 64%, newborn mortality did not move
Under-five deaths fell from 115 to 41 per 1,000 live births between 2003 and 2022. Newborn deaths stayed at 21 per 1,000 and now make up about half of the under-five total. About 30,000 newborns die a year, roughly four an hour.
Where under-five deaths now sit
Deaths per 1,000 live births. The 2022 bar is split by age.
The residual
What two decades of child survival gains did not reach.
−64%
fall in under-five mortality, 2003 to 2022
51%
of under-five deaths are now newborns (21 of 41); the report says “nearly 50%”
30,000
newborn deaths a year, mostly prematurity, birth asphyxia and sepsis
The report states plainly that Kenya is not on track for SDG 3.2. The gains came from interventions that work after the neonatal period, such as immunisation, malaria control and nutrition. Newborn survival depends on the quality of care during labour and the first days, which is a facility and workforce problem rather than a campaign problem.
6
88% of WHO Kenya's funding is voluntary, not assessed
Only 12% is assessed contribution, the flexible core. The other 88% comes from donors with their own priorities: GAVI alone provides 26% and the United Kingdom 16% across two departments. The published shares sum to 91%, leaving 9% unlabelled, and no total budget figure appears anywhere in the report.
Assessed core versus voluntary
Assessed contributions are the flexible core. The report does not say how much of the rest is formally earmarked.
Concentration among donors
Share of the published top-ten funding profile.
26%
from GAVI alone, the single largest source
16%
from the UK, via FCDO (5%) and DHSC (11%)
20%
from two US private foundations, Myriad and STBF
Three sources account for 62% of the profile. Donor concentration explains a good deal of what this dashboard shows elsewhere: immunisation and outbreak response are well covered because that is what GAVI and outbreak donors fund, while cancer screening and newborn care compete for the flexible 12%. Without a budget total, the percentages cannot be converted into money.
7
The report contradicts itself on at least thirteen figures
Cross-checking the narrative sections against the infographics and the foreword surfaces repeated disagreements on the same quantity. Most are drifting counts. The first is a different and more serious class: a claim the report's own figure contradicts. Together they make several headline numbers unciteable without a caveat.
Same quantity, different figures
Every pair below is drawn from the 2025 annual report itself. Figure B is the competing value, or the target in the case of the first row.
Page references follow the report's own printed page numbers. Where a quantity appears more than twice, the two most widely separated values are shown.
A few have innocent explanations. The malaria at-risk figure is probably modelled on a later population projection than the 2023 census figure beside it. Most do not. Health spending cannot be 7.2% of GDP and 7.2% of the national budget at once. A programme cannot surpass a 95% target with 94%. And the cholera counts resist the obvious defence that they use different case definitions and cut-off dates, because a cumulative death toll cannot fall: 13 deaths reported by May cannot become 6 deaths for the full year.