- Mombasa was targeting to receive over 5,000 tourists from Ukraine by May.
- Mombasa was to send its doctors and nurses to Ukraine for specialised further training and Ukraine was to send its specialists doctors to Mombasa.
Image: File
Image: COURTESY
The ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia has a direct negative impact on Mombasa.
Last year, the Mombasa county government signed partnership agreements and held several marketing engagements with government and private stakeholders in Ukrainian cities of Odessa and Kiev.
Governor Hassan Joho's administration sent a delegation to Ukraine to meet with tour operators and the media to bolster relations between Mombasa and the Ukrainian cities.
A delegation from Ukraine also arrived in Mombasa to explore the tourist attraction sites that Mombasa and the coastal strip have to offer.
The partnerships saw Mombasa receive several direct charter flights with hundreds of tourists from Ukraine to the Moi Airport, Mombasa.
As the new cycle of charter flights resumed on October 15 last year, Mombasa was targeting to receive over 5,000 tourists from Ukraine by May this year.
In early February this year, the county government of Mombasa entered into yet another agreement with Ukraine, which was to see Mombasa specialists and health workers trained abroad.
However, with the raging war in Ukraine, the Mombasa county officials have said all these plans and programmes have now been put on a hold and the future remains obscured.
Speaking to the Star, Mombasa County Health chief officer Dr Khadija Shikely said a team from Mombasa was to travel to Ukraine this first week of March.
“After the Ukrainian team left Mombasa in the first week of February, they sent us an invitation. A team of health officials and some from the governor’s office were to travel to that country in the beginning of March,” Shikely said.
She said their visas were already being processed.
They were going to visit the medical facilities in Ukraine and see the areas of cooperation between the cities of Odessa and Mombasa.
“After our visit, we were to come and select the health officers who will be sent to Ukraine for specialised training. They were to train our nurses in the areas of urology, renal, radiotherapy and in ICU,” she said.
Ukraine was also to send specialist doctors to Coast General Teaching and Referral Hospital from March this year, Shikely said.
“At the newly opened Cath-lab at Coast General, we only have an intervention cardiologist. The machines in that facility can treat even broken arteries in the brain. Ukraine was to send us an intervention neurologist to work in that facility,” she said.
Shikely said, "It is unfortunate that we have to halt all these programmes, but we have not cancelled the partnership with them. We will continue immediately after everything returns to normal.”
Apart from the partnership in health, Ukraine has also been working with Mombasa on promotion of the tourism sector.
Last November, the director of the Sister Cities Project in Mombasa, Salma Noor, said the partnership between Ukraine and Mombasa will benefit the entire coastal region.
“Tourism is one of the hardest-hit sectors of the economy by Covid-19. The partnership between Mombasa and Ukraine will not only benefit Mombasa but the entire Coast region,” Noor said then.
She was speaking in Diani after hosting a cocktail party for visiting tour operators and the media from Ukraine.
The honorary consul of Ukraine in Mombasa Oleksii Sierkov said Ukraine was committed to the partnership, adding that they were targeting more cities for similar deals.
“We are also working on charters from other big cities in Ukraine, we have around seven international airports, and all of them send around 20 charters to Egypt and Turkey weekly. Our target is to allocate at least one charter flight per week from different cities of Ukraine to Kenya,” Sierkov said then.
He said they were targeting to bring in students and doctors for an exchange programme in Mombasa, hoping to take more Kenyans to Ukraine for the same to strengthen the partnership.
-Edited by SKanyara