NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov 16 – The Council of Governors (CoG) Tuesday unveiled a three-day vaccination campaign targeting delegates due to attend the 7th Annual Devolution Conference in Makueni.
The vaccination drive which commenced on Tuesday will be conducted at the council’s Delta Corner offices in Westlands, Nairobi.
The campaign is part of broad efforts to suppress the spread of coronavirus and keep the positivity rate below the 5 percent threshold recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Kenya reported a 0.7 percent positivity rate on Monday, one of the lowest in recent days, with only twelve cases picked from 1,730 samples tested within 24 hours.
Nairobi and Bungoma registered 2 and 4 cases respectively with the remaining six reported in Baringo, Meru, Murang’a, Nakuru, Nandi, and Turkana.
The country’s cumulative coronavirus fatalities stood at 5,319 with the Ministry of Health reporting three virus-triggered deaths on Monday.
About 6 million people were reported to have been vaccinated including 2.1 million fully vaccinated persons. The proportion of fully vaccinated adults stood at 7.7 percent.
The Steering Committee tasked with the planning of the devolution conference scheduled to take place at Makueni Boys’ High School from 23rd to 26th November 2021, on Thursday said all the 3,000 delegates and 1,000 development partners will be required to have undergone vaccination against COVID-19 to be cleared to attend.
The Committee further urged attendees to complete online registration by November 18.
“We urge all our international guests to ensure that they carry their vaccination certificates as the same will be verified by the Ministry of Health during the registration process,” the Steering Committee said in a statement released on November 11.
The Ministry of Health designated the conference as a controlled meeting in line with revised coronavirus containment measures capping attendance of conferences at two-thirds of auditorium capacity.
The Council also announced that the host county had 11 isolation facilities with 80 HDU and 9 ICU beds to support emergency response.
The upward revision of the maximum capacity from a third to two-thirds necessitated a review of the number of delegates initially capped at 1,000.
The conference themed ‘Multi-Level Governance for Climate Action: Sub-National Mobilization in Unlocking the Full Potential of Climate Action during and after Pandemics,’ will seek to mobilize support in counties for intervention to combat climate change and its impacts.
Coming against the backdrop of the COP26 Summit in Glasgow, the conference has been cited as the first climate change forum globally at a subnational level.
During COP 26, Kenya committed to working with other African countries that form the ‘Giants Club’ conservation group to raise resources for investment in the continent’s climate change mitigation programs.
Kenya also committed to fully transitioning to green energy by 203o.
Engagements at the devolution conference will adopt a dialogue approach featuring five plenary sessions in the main plenum and fourteen sector-specific breakaway sessions, the Council said.
The Steering Committee has also mobilized a reforestation campaign that saw 1,999,999 trees grown in Makueni, Machakos, Kitui, and Kajiado counties as a precursor activity to the conference.
President Uhuru Kenyatta who will open the conference on November 23 will plant the 2 millionth tree according to the committee.
