The Mpala Mobile Clinic, a clinic on wheels, visits 25 different rural sites in Laikipia, Kenya each month. Staffed by two nurses and a driver, the bright yellow Land Rover is a well known sight throughout the area, as it travels over 25,000km annually.

Founded in 1999, the Mpala Mobile Clinic serves communities with no access to any professional healthcare. It offers family planning, reproductive health education, childhood immunizations, HIV/AIDS awareness training, and basic health care to thousands of rural Kenyans.

In 2002, the Clinic served over 45,000 people, and now over 91% of the children under 5 in the areas served have been inoculated. With over 2,000 female clients on family planning and an average of 70 new women joining the program each month, the Mpala Mobile Clinic continues to reach new people and serve new clients all the time.

MCT reaches a total of 50,000 people a yr with its services which includes over 7,800 (+34 primary school) school children from Poor remote homes. So far 12,111 immunizations have been given by MCT in the last 5 yrs, with 4,612 clients taking Family Planning methods. It was a dream come true for the people of Laikipia to receive Health services. In a recent survey of attitudes, 97% of the people interviewed were satisfied with the services MCT offers. "Without the mobile clinic we are dead" one said. Statistics show that there is only one nurse to 30,000 people in Kenya.

(Sub Saharan Africa is the regions worst affected by HIV/AIDS (10% of global population & has 70% of PLWHA - People Living with HIV/AIDS). In Kenya the number of people living with HIV/AIDS is estimated at 1.4 million (this is considered to be much higher by those actually working in the field). There are nearly 1 million orphans due to HIV AIDS. New infections in 2004 were 86,000 while the recorded AIDS deaths in 2004 were 140,000. Life expectancy in some parts of Kenya is 40 yrs old...down from 70 yrs before the AIDS epidemic. HIV/Aids component has shown remarkable impact through Voluntary Counselling & Testing campaigns (VCT) . In this regard MCT is offering VCT services by working with 4 Community based distributors in collaboration with Centres for Disease Control by sponsoring their training and loaning them bicycles to assist them with their work.

To find out more about the Mobile clinic, visit its website at: www.mpala.org/mct . Also, learn about its sister-clinic in the Samburu district, Nomadic Communities Trust.