City Hall unveils plan to help vulnerable groups

City Hall has launched a feeding programme targeting the most vulnerable population in Nairobi’s informal settlements to cushion them against the negative effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The programme will cover more than 127,500 vulnerable households in need of support across the 17 sub-counties in Nairobi with about 25,500 households targeted in the first phase.

Nairobi acting governor Ann Kananu said the targeted population include women, people living with disability, the elderly and those living with HIV and other chronic diseases.

“We have, however, picked about 25,500 households most desperately in need of food assistance for the next three months between April and June, 2021,” said Ms Kananu.

She said her administration will distribute to the population food stuff including maize and wheat flour, sugar, rice, loaves of bread and powdered milk as well as other items such as blankets, sanitary pads and basins.

The items will be distributed to the identified beneficiaries on a weekly basis over the next three months across all the seventeen sub-counties.

The deputy governor said the target population was arrived at after three weeks of mapping the most vulnerable in the society as well carrying out a needs assessment of the most vulnerable members and the number of households mostly affected in the county.

Serious food shortage 

The exercise was spearheaded by a technical team within the county government’s Disaster Management department.

“Due to the high number of positive cases we have in Nairobi, our county has been placed under lock down exposing vulnerable families to serious food insecurity challenges. The combinations of all the above factors have contributed to a lot of hardship to the vulnerable population of our county,” she said.

Nairobi County Chief Officer for Disaster Management Mr Mohamed Sahal said the county intends to work with MCAs who will go door-to-door to donate the food stuffs to avoid the spread of the corona virus.

Meanwhile, Ms Kananu attended her first Council of Governors extra-ordinary meeting on Covid-19 pandemic.

The Monday virtual meeting saw the 47 governors discuss setting up of a framework for prompt release of funds to county governments in order to facilitate provision of efficient services to wananchi.

This is in addition to release of Sh10 million Covid-19 surgical masks, sanitisers and other personal protective equipment (PPEs) to counties to help in the fight against coronavirus disease.

In her address, Ms Kananu said that despite Covid-19 pandemic being a health issue, it has become a major economic issue negatively affecting various sectors of the economy including transport, housing, health, trade, tourism and entertainment sectors.

“The impact of Covid-19 on mwananchi will be long term thus requiring an urgent strategic approach to manage going forward. The pandemic has led to massive loss of jobs and income, lack of employment opportunities and increasing poverty levels which have in effect aggravated food security issues to low income urban households with Nairobi County being the most affected,” she said.