About Us

Poor health and poverty are intricately linked, with health outcomes and disparities largely driven by social determinants, including social, economic, physical, or other conditions where people live, learn, work, play and age that influence their health, and the systems put in place to deal with ill-health. Cyclically, poverty leads to poor health and poor health leads to poverty. However, efforts to address health and poverty have always been attempted in isolation; anti-poverty programs are rarely targeted to improve health, while pro-health programs and policies rarely have a systematic focus to address the most pervasive risk factors underlying poor health. With its headquarters in Kisumu, Kenya, Poverty and Health Integrated Solutions (PHIS), a national research and development organization, was formed to fill in this gap. PHIS programs are designed to improve health by addressing proximal causes of poor health, supported by evidence-based interventions that systematically alleviate distal factors including poverty, and embedded within such cross cutting themes as capacity building, policy, gender and climate change, for poor rural and urban dwellers in Kenya.