Chronic diseases among children under five, including tuberculosis, polio, tetanus and measles, could soon decline in Tuvila village, Kitui County, following the electrification of the local dispensary under the government’s Last Mile Connectivity Project.
For years, the Tuvila Dispensary, which serves over 600 patients a month, struggled to offer basic healthcare services because it lacked electricity.
The situation denied children timely immunisation and forced mothers to trek long distances, sometimes up to 20 kilometers, in search of vaccines and maternal care.
“My name is Juliet Nzau. I’m the nurse in charge here at Tuvila Dispensary,” she says proudly, standing outside the now-bright health facility.
“This is a level-two hospital in Kitui South, Ikanga Ward, Umakele location, Tuvila Village. We opened the facility on October 15, 2018. Seven years without a source of power, so that means some services we never used to deliver.”
The absence of power meant that vaccines could not be stored safely, making immunisation, one of the facility’s most vital services, nearly impossible.
Mothers were forced to walk for hours under the scorching Kitui sun to nearby hospitals or other distant centers that offered cold storage for vaccines. “We never used to do immunisation,” Juliet recalls. “Our people used to walk long distances, like 15 to 20 kilometres, looking for a facility with immunisation services.”
In 2023, the facility received a gas-powered freezer to store vaccines, but the high cost of refilling the gas made the system unsustainable.
“Gas is very expensive,” Juliet explains. “It has been a big challenge for us, because sometimes you have to go into your pocket and use your money as you wait for the budget to be released.”
The lack of electricity also crippled other essential services.
Cervical cancer screening, for instance, depended on a small rechargeable torch, one that often lost charge before the day ended. “We need electricity, that’s also partly to charge that torch, and light for good viewing of the cervix,” says Juliet.
Yet despite being a level-two facility under the Social Health Authority (SHA), meaning all services are free, patients were still spending money on transport to distant hospitals. “We don’t charge. Because SHA is, of course, catering for everything, so they don’t need to pay anything,” Juliet explains. “ It is a free service, everything is free here.”
That struggle finally ended this month when electricity reached Tuvila Dispensary for the first time in its seven-year history. The simple act of switching on the lights has transformed service delivery.
“Now I can smile,” Juliet says, her relief evident. “We can run immunisation properly, store those drugs for maternal, and do cervical cancer screening.”
The connection is part of Kenya Power’s ongoing efforts to expand rural electrification in Kitui County.
The company recently completed a Ksh 22 million inter-connector between Kitui and Machakos counties and plans to construct a substation at Mbitini to boost power supply and reduce outages in areas such as Ikanga, Zombe, Voo and Ikutha.
Over the last two years, Kenya Power has doubled the capacity of the Kitui Substation to 10MVA and replaced more than 1,200 termite-damaged wooden poles with concrete ones, a KSh 140 million investment that has improved reliability for over 94,000 households.
Under the ongoing Phase IV of the Last Mile Connectivity Project, another 7,500 households are expected to join the grid.
For Juliet and the community she serves, these national investments have brought tangible change.
“It feels like a dream come true,” she says with a smile. “It is like a dream come true, we never knew that, even it is not a dream, we never knew that we could get electricity, but now we know that our President is overworking.”
As evening falls over Kitui South, the once-dark dispensary now glows softly, a symbol of progress and the power of connection.
