iHRIS Gives Kenya An Active Personnel System for the Entire Public Sector

The HRIS implementation team for Capacity Kenya (CK), has championed the use of iHRIS in Kenya and because of their efforts we are excited to soon have a fully integrated system for HRH for policy, planning, and management throughout the country.

iHRIS work in Kenya began in August 2009 when iHRIS Manage was implemented to help HR Managers better track the location and skills of their health workers. Drawn from Kenya’s two Ministries of Health, 43 senior HR Managers were trained and iHRIS Manage began improving the lives of health workers by tracking and reporting the skills of Kenya’s health workforce. It was discovered during the training, however, that in more than 30% of cases a health worker’s pay station was not the same as that worker’s work location. This made job transfers difficult and as a result, workers were often transferred to new locations leading to a skewed distribution of workforce that impacted negatively to an already understaffed health care system.

As a solution, more information needed to be gathered to link the health workforce to their current workstations/health facilities. An easy and inexpensive strategy was used; for the first time, location data was collected during the quarterly payroll validation exercise. When the Ministries sent payroll listings to the field for workers to sign for their payslips, workers were now expected to not only sign their payslips but also indicate their work location. Temporary hires entered this data into a newly created (but temporary) database and by August 2010 all data, including the number, name, and facility where each health worker was currently working, was collected and entered into this new database. Once that database held this new and accurate information, all data was uploaded into iHRIS Manage. For the first time, iHRIS Manage held accurate data on over 36,000 of Kenya’s health workers.

On October 18th and 19th Dr. Wakibi and the HRIS team were able to share with the leadership of both of Kenya’s Ministries of Health what HRIS is and why one is needed. Capacity Kenya achieved buy-in from both Ministries to expand the rollout of iHRIS to the counties and has the highest authorities backing the expanded implementation. Dr. Wakibi is now collaborating with the MOH and MOPS to ensure all HR data for hiring, transferring, and retiring health workers are electronically entered into iHRIS by the Complement Section so that iHRIS becomes an integral part of the daily operations for HRH in Kenya. The importance of this system being housed in Complement is monumental; housing the system in Complement ensures that this process becomes the standard of doing HRH work in the country and keeps HRIS systems sustainable. We have Dr. Wakibi to thank for this brilliant idea and it will be a key reason for Kenya’s long-term success.

Next steps? Work, work and more work! Both Ministries are convinced iHRIS is the solution to HRM issues in the health sector and that CK has the capacity to customize and implement the expansion and implementation of the larger system.