Students Drive Impact Through Hem Practice Charity Initiative

My name is Keith Chege, a student in Crawford International school, and I lead a student-led initiative focused on improving women's access to health care in Kenya.

To illustrate the core mission driving our need to generate resources, first we need to understand the problem. There are extremely few laparoscopic gynecological surgeons in Kenya: a mere five in total. That means for women to gain access to surgeries related to their reproductive system, they only have 0.71% finding these five doctors. This means that they are exposed to open surgeries increasing risk of death and infections. To solve this problem doctor Dennis Mureithi created a clinic where they not only aim to solve this issue, they teach the next generation of laparoscopic surgeons and offer surgeries at a subsidised rate and they often go on missions where they give out free surgeries -at least once in two months-. Doctor Dennis Mureithi and co-founder Faith Wanjeri are not only heroes to those women who have been in their care, they are well respected people in the gynecological field.

To provide free surgical care for women in need, THE HEM PRACTICE combines community donations with internal funding to cover all remaining costs. This sadly means that some women are left out, and this is out of the HEM PRACTICE control. Targeting 180,000 KES to support six women in need of surgery , we mobilized our community through a combination of two fundraising efforts, a paid dress down and through donations. Recognizing that student motivation was essential, we designed a dual-track event featuring both traditional sports and e-sports.

Planning was extremely difficult, managing school and this event was arduous. It was to a point where a week before the event I almost gave up. We had hoped to kick off our mini-sports festival during the first week, but the weather had other plans, While we had to postpone, it felt like a hidden miracle that gave us more time to prepare for the E-sports event, I can't imagine how the e-sports event if only two people had 2 people working on it as originally planned. But most of the event on that day went to plan with a few minor set-backs here and there. The sports festival -which took place the following week- went perfectly, Most sports were extremely competitive and we achieved our goal of student motivation.

Having exceeded our target with a total of 226,620 KES, we are now able to sponsor seven surgeries in total while retaining a balance for the HEM PRACTICE. Of course we are still open to donations so with your help we can pay for 8 surgeries.

“Make minimal invasive surgery the norm not the exception. HEM PRACTICE