Sixteen million children and a stronger shield against disease

When a child in a remote Wajir village receives a typhoid vaccine for the first time, the benefit is immediate and personal. When 16.7 million children receive that vaccine across Kenya in a single year, the benefit becomes structural: a population better protected, a health system more capable of sustaining that protection and a national immunisation schedule modernised to reflect the best available science.

Both things happened in 2025.

Behind the campaigns sits a quiet but consequential modernisation of Kenya's national immunisation schedule. With UN Kenya support through the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO), the schedule was updated to include the Typhoid Conjugate Vaccine, a second dose of inactivated polio vaccine and a shift to a single-dose HPV schedule. These are regulatory decisions that will shape what every Kenyan child receives at every clinic visit for years to come. Digital tools for real-time monitoring during vaccination campaigns were introduced, allowing health managers to see gaps as they appeared rather than discovering them in retrospective surveys.

The hardest result was the smallest one. Targeted outreach identified and vaccinated 78,575 zero-dose children: those who had not received any routine vaccine at all. They live in remote pastoralist settlements, in Nairobi's informal settlements, in refugee communities. They are vulnerable precisely because the system has not reached them. Reaching them required deliberate, costly, community-level work.

The financing matters. UN Kenya supported the Government's applications to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (Gavi), securing USD 26 million in grants for health systems strengthening and cold chain management. Cold chain is what keeps a vaccine viable from production to point of delivery. In Kenya's geography, with vaccines moving from Nairobi to Marsabit through unreliable electricity grids, cold chain investment determines whether a vaccine bought is a vaccine delivered.

Beyond immunisation, the policy environment shifted in ways that will outlast any single campaign. The Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child, Adolescent Health and Nutrition (RMNCAH+N) Investment Case 2025–2030 was launched, providing a coordinated five-year framework for health and nutrition programming across Kenya. Kenya advanced towards WHO Maturity Level 3 for medical products, strengthening regulatory oversight. A national hypertension management protocol was developed and validated, recognising that as Kenya's population grows, non-communicable diseases will demand the same sustained attention that infectious diseases have received.

In 2025, 22,252,050 people benefited from integrated health services and prevention campaigns supported by the Government of Kenya and UN Kenya. That figure spans immunisation, maternal health, cancer screening and non-communicable disease management. For the RMNCAH+N Investment Case launched this year to deliver on its five-year commitment, the systems put in place in 2025 will need to hold.

Read the 2025 UN Kenya Annual Results Report to explore the full range of health results achieved last year.