Prof. Peter Mungai, the Director of the East Africa Kidney Institute (EAKI) will be the happiest man on earth once the construction works of the kidney hospital will be completed.
According to him, he has had a dream of building a kidney hospital for many years and its completion will be a dream come true.
Already the University of Nairobi, where EAKI is based and Kenyatta National Hospital have handed the construction site where the hospital is set to be built to a Chinese company paving way for construction works to begin.
The construction of the hospital will be fully funded by the government of Kenya and the African Development Bank (AfDB) to a tune of over KES 2 billion.
Prof. Mungai says securing the funding was not a walk in the park.
“We wrote so many documents about the kidney hospital and presented in many conferences both locally and internationally,” Prof. Mungai said in an interview.
Prof. Mungai and his team got a chance to present their document to AfDB and that is where the whole story changed.
“UoN and KNH were chosen to host the project as a centre of excellence for the East African region. The government asked us to negotiate with AfDB for Kenya to get funding to have the institute built,” Prof. Mungai said.
In 2014, Prof. Mungai and the team hit the ground running and started EAKI after undergoing all the approval process right from the Department of Surgery in the School of Medicine, College of Health Sciences up to the UoN Senate.
It was then that the institute was asked to come up with programs aimed at equipping medical staff with knowledge and skills that were required for the roll out of a national dialysis project. So far, the Institute has trained staff in all the 47 counties and the project was rolled out, while EAKI continues to offer other courses to health care providers to advance services in kidney related diseases.
The Institute will soon start to offer PhD in Euro Nephrology Sciences with Prof. Mungai saying there is no need for one to travel abroad for training.
All this is a journey that Prof. Mungai says is a dream come true not only to him but to the people of Kenya as far as health is concerned.
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