More than 800 tea farmers have been offered free medical attention sponsored by the KTDA Foundation targeting the Iriaini Tea Factory catchment area, in Nyeri County.
The farmers and their families attended three medical camps at Thunguri dispensary and received screening, treatment and nutrition services.
The medical camp was a collaboration between KTDA Foundation, Iriaini Tea Factory and Nyeri County’s Department of Health.
The camp, which was officially closed by KTDA holdings board member representative for zone four Michael Kamau Ngatia offered various health services to the community, which included rapid blood sugar tests, blood pressure monitoring, Prostate Surface Antigen (PSA Tests), COVID-19 Vaccines (Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca) nutrition and health talks, cervical and breast cancer screening, eye screening, HPV vaccine, consultation and pharmaceutical services.
While closing the camp, the board member noted that the key objective of KTDA Foundation to improve the welfare of smallholder tea farmers through sustainable partnerships and programmes was being achieved.
“I am happy KTDA Foundation’s objective is being achieved through this. Apart from the regular free medical camps, through KTDA Foundation over 150,000 farmers have been trained on financial literacy, resource and business management” He said.
This week, another medical camp is set to be held in Tombe tea factory catchment area.
KTDA Foundation has been running medical camps in tea catchment areas since 2016 to help farmers become more productive by improving access to health services.
For the last three years, over 100,000 smallholder tea farmers and communities have received screening and treatment services and over 1,000,000 receiving various health and nutrition messages.
“Since the inception of the free medical camps 3 years ago, over 100,000 thousand tea farmers and their communities have directly benefited from a total of 40 medical camps that have been undertaken so far ,” KTDA Foundation Head Sudi Matara said.
“We also provided the Ministry of Health platform during the camp for Covid-19 sensitization and vaccination services. Through vaccination against Covid-19, we are going a long way in helping to curb the spread of COVID-19 amongst the smallholder tea farmers in the tea growing areas” Sudi added.
KTDA Foundation also donated 10,000 litre water tanks to Kigumo and Thunguri primary schools.
The medical camps are part of the wider Corporate Social Investing (CSI) activities that the Foundation engages which include environmental conservation, economic empowerment initiatives and secondary school education scholarships.
