Lwala Community Alliance Founders, Doctors Milton and Fred Ochieng’
The Lwala Community Alliance was founded by Kenyan brothers Milton and Fred Ochieng’, who are natives of Lwala, a rural village in Western Kenya. Milton and Fred lost their parents to HIV while in college in the U.S. and took this as a call to action to provide access to primary care in their community. During medical school at Vanderbilt, the brothers did all they could to raise the funds to start a clinic back at home. Their story is the subject of the documentary “Sons of Lwala” and has been featured on ABC World News and CNN.
In April 2007, after 3 years of fundraising, the Lwala Community Health Center finally opened. Through a staff of more than 25 Kenyans, we treat an average of 1,700 patients each month and have over 1000 people enrolled in HIV care. Over time the program has become more multi-dimensional to include small scale micro-enterprise, public health outreach, water and sanitation, and education programming. In April 2011, construction on a new maternity and integrative care wing was completed, thereby tripling the space of the original clinic. As a result, the facility is now designated as the Lwala Community Hospital.
