| Abstract: | Precarity is increasingly a condition of life for Kenyan health workers as even professionals face costs of living and forms of debt that exceed their (unstable) salaries. Years of austerity and chronic scarcity have eroded healthcare infrastructures and rendered crises part of everyday work. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Kenya from 2018 to 2020, we explore health workers’ experiences and concerns about the precarity of their working conditions, livelihoods, health and futures amidst the government's attempts to experiment with ‘universal health coverage’ (UHC) and improve access to healthcare. While UHC appears to call for greater state responsibility for healthcare futures, healthcare provision is being further outsourced and privatized, underlining that seemingly progressive health policies like UHC are sustaining and replicating neoliberal trends. |
