ENTEPESI, Kajiado, Sep 1 — Before health workers started coming to her village, Sarah Naisoi Songoi knew that getting medical care meant a journey.The nearest health facility is about 10 kilometres away. For families living in remote communities across the greater Amboseli landscape, that distance can turn a routine clinic visit into a difficult undertaking.For pregnant women, mothers with young children and people who need regular treatment, distance can determine whether they receive care at all.“Life was very difficult because the distance was far. It could take us hours to get to the nearest hospital,” Songoi said.Another resident, Sokoiyan Partet, said the initiative had helped bridge the healthcare gap while giving communities vital information about their health.Now, the journey is beginning to work in the opposite direction.Instead of patients travelling long distances to reach a health facility, healthcare workers are travelling into the villages.What began in 2022 as a “backpack nurses” initiative, in which individual nurses travelled by motorcycle carrying medicines and basic medical equipment, is now being expanded into a more ambitious mobile clinic model.Big Life Foundation launched the expanded integrated health outreach programme in August, bringing multidisciplinary health teams into remote communities using four-wheel-drive vehicles.The new teams will travel to villages up to 60 kilometres from existing health services, bringing antenatal care, ultrasound scans, malaria and HIV testing, cervical cancer screening, and other diagnostic and treatment services closer to people who might otherwise spend hours travelling to a health facility.The shift is more than an expansion of equipment and personnel. It represents a different way of delivering healthcare in places where distance remains one of the biggest barriers to access.Taking the clinic to the peopleAt Entepesi, within Rombo Group Ranch, the principle is already familiar.Liz Chebony of Njukini Dispensary says the facility serves about 10,000 people and works with Big Life to conduct outreach in 15 villages, some a considerable distance from the dispensary.“We have a place known as Mapino. Mapino is about 18 km from the facility,” Chebony said.Entepesi itself is about 10 kilometres from the facility.The outreach teams visit communities twice a month, providing antenatal care, family planning and services for children.“Some of these mothers cannot walk for more than 10 km to the facility. So we do go to the community to reach for their services,” Chebony said.The logic is straightforward. If distance prevents patients from reaching healthcare, move at least some healthcare services closer to them.A mother can receive antenatal care closer to home. A child can be vaccinated without the family making a long trip to a dispensary. Community health workers can also follow up patients in their own villages rather than trying to find families who have disappeared into remote settlements.Community health promoter Jacob Kasine Kutata says distance has made it difficult to keep track of mothers and children who miss clinic appointments.“Most of them are mothers, especially some who disappear during clinic visits and don’t finish. You find a child gets vaccinated only once or twice, then they disappear,” he said.For Kutata, having health services brought directly into the village makes that follow-up easier.“So today we were followed right into the village, and it has been a great help,” he said.Regular outreach, he added, would reduce the workload of community health volunteers and make it easier to ensure mothers take their children for care.From a backpack to a mobile clinicThe experience in Entepesi is now being expanded.Under the new model, three integrated outreach clinics will be held every month, with each deployment reaching at least three villages identified by the Ministry of Health as having the greatest healthcare needs.The teams will comprise two nurses, two clinicians, a laboratory technician, a nutritionist, a Community Health Assistant and three Community Health Promoters, all drawn from local public health facilities.Big Life will provide transport, manage logistics and coordinate the outreach, while the Ministry of Health works with the programme to deliver the services.The result is a mobile health facility that does not need a permanent building.A care point can be established beneath the shade of an acacia tree or beside a cluster of manyattas. Folding tables can become consultation areas, while portable diagnostic equipment allows laboratory services to be provided in the community.That is a significant evolution from the original backpack nurse model.The nurses who began travelling into remote villages carried basic medicines and medical equipment on motorcycles. The expanded model brings a broader group of health professionals and specialist equipment, allowing communities to access services that previously required a trip to a health facility.Joel Lekeni, Big Life’s Health Programme Lead, said the expansion would allow the programme to provide more services while strengthening its impact on communities.“I’m very happy because the programme will continue while introducing more services than before,” Lekeni said. “I see a more empowered community and better health for the people we serve.”The cost of distanceFor residents, the importance of the model is measured less in programme design than in the journeys it eliminates.Pastor Francis Kasaine, a resident of the area, says some villagers have previously travelled to Taveta and Tanzania to seek healthcare.“We have been spending a lot of money—we go to Taveta, we go to Tanzania because of the lack of healthcare,” he said.The problem is particularly difficult for mothers with young children and pregnant women.Songoi says women in the community have sometimes given birth at home because of the difficulties involved in reaching healthcare.“Women sometimes face challenges and end up giving birth at home,” she said.She says having health workers come into the villages is beginning to ease some of those difficulties.“Now, when Big Life comes, they come even when we are in the farms,” she said.For a community health system, the benefits of that proximity extend beyond the day of an outreach clinic.Health workers can identify illnesses earlier, provide preventive services and follow up patients who might otherwise be lost to the system.Wilson Chesum, Medical Officer of Health for Loitokitok Sub-County, says the approach could help address some of the problems associated with patients living far from health facilities.“Mobile clinics allow us to take essential health services directly to people in hard-to-reach areas,” Chesum said.He said the approach was expected to reduce treatment defaults, improve early detection and management of illness and ultimately reduce preventable sickness and deaths.“Most importantly, it helps us move closer to ensuring that every person can access quality healthcare, regardless of how far they live from a health facility,” Chesum said.A model built around distanceThe greater Amboseli landscape presents precisely the kind of challenge for which mobile healthcare is designed.Rather than concentrating all services in fixed facilities, the expanded programme will take multidisciplinary teams to communities that the Ministry of Health identifies as having the greatest healthcare needs.The programme is expected to reach more than 20,000 people in the landscape’s most remote communities through the end of 2028.Each outreach will reach at least three villages, with the expanded model expected to more than double the number of people reached during an individual outreach—from about 70 to more than 140.Big Life says its healthcare programme, including the backpack nurses initiative, reached more than 100,000 people between 2023 and 2025.The new programme is funded by CHASE Africa and is being implemented in collaboration with the Ministry of Health.For Big Life, the health intervention also forms part of its broader effort to build relationships with communities living alongside wildlife.Lekeni sees the health intervention as part of that relationship.“I also see continued mindset change among the community and people embracing Big Life’s conservation efforts because of the humanitarian interventions we continue to provide,” he said.More than a medical interventionThe needs voiced in Entepesi extend beyond healthcare.Kasaine says the village also needs an Early Childhood Development centre and clean water. Petero Salonik, another resident, lauded the initiative, saying it had played a critical role in bringing health services closer to the community.He said the local school also needs support for a teacher who is currently working voluntarily and appealed for a water tank.Those requests underline the reality facing remote communities: healthcare access is part of a wider infrastructure gap.But the mobile clinic model offers a way of addressing one particularly stubborn barrier—distance—without waiting for a permanent health facility to be built in every settlement.It also builds on the existing public health system rather than creating a parallel one. The nurses, clinicians, laboratory technician, nutritionist and community health workers in the new teams are drawn from local public facilities, while Big Life provides the transport and logistics needed to get them into remote areas.For communities such as Entepesi, the significance is simple.The clinic does not necessarily have to be a building at the end of a long road. It can be a nurse arriving on a motorcycle with a backpack—or, increasingly, a four-wheel-drive vehicle carrying a team of health workers, medicines and diagnostic equipment into a village where the nearest health facility may be dozens of kilometres away.The idea behind the model is not to bring every hospital service to every village.It is to close the distance between the health system and the people it is meant to serve.And in remote communities, sometimes the most important part of healthcare is simply getting close enough to deliver it.