program administrators
Each year, nearly 8,000 Kenyan women die during pregnancy or childbirth – and another 160,000 are injured or disabled – largely because they lack access to skilled medical attention. With the healthcare systems’ high out-of-pocket fees, poorly staffed facilities, and costly transport from home many poor women believe that high quality maternity care is out of reach.
But now the Kenyan government is exploring an innovative program that gives the poorest women a “kadi,” meaning “voucher” in Swahili. Women can use them like coupons, exchanging vouchers for prenatal and delivery services from approved healthcare providers. The Population Council is measuring the difference that vouchers make in the lives of women who use them.
Kadi is a short documentary spotlighting an innovative voucher program in Kenya that is working to reduce the amount of deaths during pregnancy (nearly 8,000 per year). By hosting a private screening at your home, office, or location of your choice, you can help us spread the word about Kadi and deliver more vouchers to women and babies in need.
As our Hosting Partner, all you have to do is invite selected people from your network to attend the event. The scope of the event is up to you and we'll provide you with screening materials, a suggested order of events, and if possible, a representative from our team to answer any questions about Kadi and the voucher program. It usually takes about 90 minutes.
With your help, we look forward to building awareness around this important issue.
Without quality and accessible health facilities, financially empowering poor mothers to obtain reproductive health services will prove to be a false promise. Watch this episode to see how four facilities in Kenya and Uganda are benefiting from and using the money provided by voucher mothers.
Evaluating voucher programs is an intensive process of collecting, organizing, cleaning, and analyzing data. This process needs to happen over largely rural areas with vast distances between households and health service providers. Watch this episode to see how the Population Council and Marie Stopes Uganda are using mobile phones and Open Data Kit to streamline the process of evaluation.
Between 5 -15% of pregnancies face some type of complication. Some of these complications can cause death or severe disability if the mother doesn’t have access to proper health care. The poorest quintile of mothers face the double challenge of lack of resources and a dearth of nearby qualified health facilities. Watch this episode to see how vouchers can be a critical safety net for poor mothers in Kenya.
Getting aid to those in need remains one of the critical challenges of social development. Watch this episode to see how the Kenyan voucher program targets and distributes vouchers to mothers that need them.
Marie Stopes Uganda has been delivering vouchers to poor women in Southwestern Uganda since 2006. Southwestern Uganda presents unique challenges to distributing vouchers and accessing health care because most people live in rural areas. Watch this episode to see the great work that Marie Stopes Uganda is doing to overcome these challenges and make reproductive health care accessible to poor Ugandan women.
Film is a powerful tool to tell stories, but is it equally powerful at documenting and evaluating impact. Kadi was conceived at the first ever cross-county gathering of voucher programs held in April 2011 in Nairobi, Kenya. The idea was simple. Document the human story behind the Kenya reproductive health voucher program that numbers, charts, tables, and words can’t tell as supplement to the rigorous statistical evaluation being conducted.
Kadi was produced, filmed, and edited over 5 and a half months starting September 2011 and ending with its premier at Social Media Week in February 2012. Kadi and the accompanying webisodes were filmed in Kenya and Uganda. Approximately 80 -120 hours of high definition verite footage was captured on three cameras.
The film would not have been possible without the openness of the program administrators, health service providers, community-based distributors, researchers, government officials, and of course mothers.
Directed and Edited by
Benjamin Ahr Harrison
Executive Producers
Mahad Ibrahim
Jaspal Sandhu
Producer
Idil Ibrahim
Producer
Pete Chatmon
Associate Producer
Anna Fahr
Camera/Sound
Anna Fahr
Benjamin Ahr Harrison
Idil Ibrahim
Lawrence Kimani
Music
Jamahl Richardson
Sound Mixer
Quinn McCarthy
Translator
John Paul Karijo
This film was produced by Gobee Group and was made possible through a grant to the Population Council from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The film/materials contained herein represent the opinions and views of the filmmakers and/or the editors, and should not be construed to be the views or opinions of the Population Council, the Gates Foundation, or companies with whom such persons or organizations that are in partnership with, associated with, or employed by.
