Family planning services have been available in Kenya since 1955 through the Ministry of Health. Today, family planning services are also provided by a number of private non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In December 1982, the Office of the Vice President established the National Council for Population and Development (NCPD) to formulate population policies and strategies and to coordinate population-oriented activities in the public and private sectors.
In 1985, Kenya's National Family Planning Program adopted as a priority strategy a program of community-based distribution of contraceptives (CBD) with the objective of expanding access to contraceptives, particularly in rural areas. This strategy has been implemented primarily through the efforts of large NGOs like the Family Planning Association of Kenya, and more recently by the Christian Health Association of Kenya and Maendeleo ya Wanawake, the national women's organization. The Ministry of Health (MOH) is also in the process of instituting CBD services.
Each of the family planning organizations providing CBD service had its own information system. Because each organization collected data that were not necessarily comparable to the data collected by the others, it became increasingly difficult to assemble national-level data. For some time, there had been an effort by the Ministry of Health, encouraged by donors, to improve the collection and availability of service statistics on family planning in Kenya, both for program management and planning.
In 1989, the need for a unified national information system became clear. Two projects were started with the purpose of gathering national statistics , one to collect data on commodities and the other to collect service statistics. Although both of these systems were designed to serve as national information systems, neither system was designed to collect data on the CBD programs. NCPD realized that developing a separate CBD information system would result in having three parallel national systems. It was clear that, to avoid this duplication, there needed to be a single information system that could be used by all organizations to produce national-level data.
In that year, NCPD contracted with a private consulting firm to help design a system to coordinate all NGO program activities. Working with the family planning NGOs, the Ministry of Health, NCPD, and various other groups, the consultants drafted a design system for service statistics and CBD data collection and reporting, which could be adopted by all the NGOs. Two meetings were then held. The first meeting described all aspects of the new National Family Planning Information Systems, including data collection forms, definitions, coding of data and its input into the system, data flow, and feedback. The second meeting discussed the role of the National Family Planning Information System and the changes necessary to implement it.
Once this new system is in place, all family planning providers will collect and report similar information and NCPD will be able to process national-level information on family planning. In addition, the annual operating costs for this single system are expected to be lower than the cost of separate systems.