Nairobi, Aug. 20 -- I attended this week's two-day town hall meeting on the health sector at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre (KICC), presided over by President William Ruto and here is my take.

My initial inclination was to dismiss the two-day town hall as yet another PR exercise, staged to let Cabinet secretaries, mandarins and governors dazzle the public with propaganda and pipe dreams about the much-maligned Universal Health Coverage programme and its centrepiece, Social Health Authority (SHA).

Yet as I followed the deliberations closely, what struck me most was the robust discussion, the informed exchanges, and the sheer volume of factual information disseminated about the state of play in the health sector-what is happ...