From fragmentation to foresight

Market intelligence and coordination is needed for health innovation introduction and access in Kenya

In January, ALIGN Consortium partner Keprecon — in partnership with the Kenya Ministry of Health — gathered leaders from government, industry, academia, and development partners in Nairobi to examine a practical challenge: How can countries make more timely, coherent decisions about which health innovations to introduce and when?

Kenya is undergoing a period of significant health system and economic reform, including:

• The rollout of TaifaCare, the government’s Universal Health Coverage program, implemented through the Social Health Authority and associated health financing funds

• Strengthening domestic manufacturing ambitions as part of health sovereignty

• Streamlining regulatory systems

• Expanding digital health infrastructure

Within this evolving context, the ALIGN Consortium seeks to address a longstanding challenge in low- and middle-income countries, including Kenya: weak coordination and inefficient systems can result in delayed or misaligned decisions around which health innovations to adopt and introduce. We are particularly focused on introduction, at the inflection point of global R&D and local, sustained access. Research shows that products take longer to clear this inflection point in LMICs versus high-income countries.

In the context of these challenges, participants at the first ALIGN Kenya Advisory Board and Technical Working Groups Workshop quickly moved beyond product enthusiasm. Participants described a more structural issue: fragmentation across both government and market actors that slows decision-making, duplicates effort, and weakens negotiating leverage. Delays in innovation uptake in Kenya, participants emphasised, are not primarily technical, but systemic. What emerged from the discussion is a set of practical actions that ALIGN Kenya can support the Ministry of Health to advance.

A pivotal policy moment for positive change

Kenya has made important legislative and policy advances, including the enactment of the Digital Health Act (2023) that established the Digital Health Agency and the proposed establishment of the Kenya Health Products and Technologies Regulatory Authority. These policy reforms create real opportunity: to strengthen regulatory coherence, improve data governance, and modernise health market oversight. Yet, these reforms need sustained support to be fully operationalised and advance progress on country-led innovation introduction decision-making.

Workshop participants emphasised the need to couple short-term pragmatic actions (e.g., strengthening stakeholder coordination, improving data access) with longer-term structural reform that can support health security and economic development. Kenya currently lacks a unified, ministry-wide policy framework to guide the introduction and adoption of new health products and technologies. Currently, fragmentation in health innovation regulatory and decision-making frameworks leaves an unclear pathway for prioritisation and introduction of health innovations.

A unified framework—underpinned by the right policies and financing flows—is therefore a core focus of ALIGN-Kenya. Together with the Ministry of Health, ALIGN-Kenya is embarking on the development and implementation of a Health Sector Partnership and Coordination Framework. The national framework on product introduction will also encompass additional and emerging agendas, such as the local manufacturing agenda.

The core problem: Fragmented data, fragmented deciders, fragmented decisions

Across ministries and agencies, participants identified a common experience

• Data on product pipelines, regulatory status, pricing trajectories, and projected volumes exist—but are dispersed.

• Fiscal implications are often calculated late in the process.

• Procurement, regulatory, and financing conversations happen sequentially rather than in parallel.

• Manufacturers lack clear demand signals early enough to shape their planning.

High-quality prioritisation and introduction decisions require aggregated, decision-relevant, and timely data on the innovation pipeline (global and domestic), supply, system capacity, and contextual features (including population preferences and disease burden). Participants agreed that governments need to see the full decision landscape early enough to make deliberate choices across innovations within a limited budget—balancing health impact, affordability, delivery feasibility, and longer-term goals for population health, health security, and economic development.

Much of this data exists. They are simply scattered, making it inefficient to put together the whole picture. Data remains distributed across multiple platforms and institutions, with limited interoperability. Inconsistencies in timeliness, completeness, and accuracy reduce reliability for policy formulation and forecasting. Even the Digital Health Act’s mandate for reporting from all providers will require incentives, technical support, and alignment of reporting standards to succeed.

A Market Intelligence Hub: From data to shared foresight and decisions

In response, the workshop endorsed development of a Market Intelligence Hub (MIH), aligned with Kenya’s Digital Health Superhighway initiative. Participants envision the MIH as a connective infrastructure, integrating data from routine health systems (e.g., Kenya Health Information System [KHIS2]), procurement authorities, national statistical agencies, and international sources. The MIH provides an anchor around which government and market actors can coordinate at different points in the prioritization and introduction process, from initial goal setting through guideline revisions.

Participants emphasised:

• Aggregating pipeline, pricing, and volume data across priority product categories.

• Translating technical assessments into fiscal and budgetary implications.

• Providing earlier visibility to manufacturers and suppliers.

• Reducing parallel analyses and aligning stakeholders around shared assumptions.

Critically, the goal is not simply more data, but improved foresight — ensuring the right analyses are available at the right time and in the right format for decision-making.

A phased, pragmatic approach was recommended:

1. Begin with a prototype dashboard consolidating readily available datasets.

2. Demonstrate early wins for prioritisation, planning, and purchasing decisions.

3. Layer additional datasets and advanced analytics over time as decision needs are better understood.

4. Invest in local capacity for data governance, analytics, and policy translation.

Effective governance will be essential. Participants in the first technical working group meeting for the MIH recommended broadening the working group’s membership to include other relevant institutions, while retaining agility. Over time, sustaining such a hub will likely require formal data-sharing agreements, financing mechanisms for ongoing analytics capacity, and integration into routine budget and planning cycles. Without policy and financing architecture to anchor it, even well-designed platforms risk becoming underused pilots — and ALIGN-Kenya is actively guarding against this outcome.

Fragmentation across government and market actors

Participants were equally clear: aggregated information alone is insufficient. Efforts must also be aggregated with strong coordination and alignment across government and market actors. Kenya’s market for health products remains fragmented and under-coordinated. While pooled procurement models such as KEMSA and MEDS demonstrate the benefits of consolidated demand, comparable mechanisms remain underdeveloped across much of the private sector. Fragmentation appears in:

• Regulatory misalignment and overregulation

• Inconsistent intersectoral coordination

• Weak enforcement of accountability frameworks

• Heavy reliance on external financing with limited domestic resource mobilisation for priority disease commodities

These dynamics create repeated assessments, delayed fiscal commitment, reduced bargaining power, and increased uncertainty for market actors. Participants in the meeting viewed evidence and data as critical levers for market shaping. But evidence must sit within coordinated institutions to matter.

ALIGN’s Role: Building coordination as infrastructure

The workshop highlighted that Kenya is not starting from scratch in strengthening systems for innovation prioritisation and introduction. Participants pointed to analytical tools already developed within government programmes, including a malaria prioritisation and analytics tool that could inform the proposed Market Intelligence Hub. Rather than building entirely new systems, these existing national assets could be adapted and integrated to accelerate progress.

Discussions also reflected growing policy momentum to streamline innovation introduction. Ongoing developments, including the Health Products and Technologies (HPT) Bill, present an opportunity to anchor clearer pathways for product introduction and cross-agency coordination in law.

The dialogue further revealed strong alignment between public and private stakeholders. Market actors, government institutions, and researchers shared a common interest in improving coordination, transparency, and predictability across the ecosystem, reinforcing that strengthening innovation introduction is a collective effort rather than a government-versus-industry dynamic.

Trust across institutions, sectors, and levels of government was described as both an outcome of the workshop and a prerequisite for effective coordination. Workshops like these are not ends unto themselves but start to build the institutional muscle memory for future coordination.

We would also like to acknowledge the following additional co-authors and event organizers: Professor Fred Were, Irene Amadi, Dan Odallo, Celestine Adipo, and Robinson Oyando.