The Effects the Violence has had on Kenya
On 28th February, President Mawi Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga signed a power sharing coalition agreement. However, horrific images of the post-election violence in Kenya are all too clear in our memories.
At least 1,500 people have died since the allegedly rigged elections and more than 600,000 people have been forced to flee their homes amid clashes between rival ethnic groups.
Despite the power sharing deal, the economic damage to Kenya is prevalent and, unlike the violence, threatens to stretch way into the future.
Tourism was the country's top foreign revenue earner, employing a quarter of a million Kenyans directly and about three million indirectly. But over the last month, twenty thousand people working in tourism have lost their jobs. Other industries to suffer are horticulture and public transport, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs and millions of dollars. These are desperate times.
Out of six hundred thousand people who have been displaced in Kenya's post-election violence, at least 15,000 are HIV-positive. Patients have either fled to their ancestral homes or are too frightened to venture outside, for fear of fresh violence erupting.
Without medical supervision not only is there the problem of accessing medication, and getting regular blood tests that hold vital information as to how anti-retroviral drugs are performing, but failure to stick to the complex drug regime increases the likelihood of drug-resistant strains of the disease taking hold. That would mean more and more patients with the AIDS virus would be harder to treat, exposing more of the population to infection.
In times of peace Kenya has performed relatively well in getting anti-retroviral treatment out to people with the AIDS virus, but the current disruption could cause irreparable damage.
Further information about the post-election conflict can be found on the following sites:
BBC Kenya page
Reuters Kenya page