Our First Week at AAR

We have already started our field project at AAR in Nairobi, and so far have completed 3 days of work during which we have accomplished significant work. We were warmly received by an enthusiastic team of people, who have put all existing resources available to us to make our experience a very rewarding and productive one. Mr. Francois van der Merwe and Mr. Edward Rukwaro are our supervisors and have been very supportive in helping us establish rapport with the staff, especially those with whom we will be interacting with to make our project successful. They have also made sure that we our comfortable and that we can efficiently perform our job in the organization.

On our first day at work last Wednesday, Mr. van der Merwe and Mr. Rukwaro made an introductory presentation of how AAR is organized. We also spoke about the project, the specific deliverables and agreed on the steps to better implement our main goal: the elaboration of process manuals for the claims and membership processes (which are the most critical processes of the insurance and medical services offered by AAR). We are well underway in the elaboration of all the manuals for the staff in the Claims Department. To accomplish this, we have interviewed team leaders, medical assessors and claim assessors to learn about their jobs and the different steps and activities they perform as a base for our documentation. We hope that by mid this week, we can proceed to document the processes in the Membership Department.

We are also very excited about our visit to Carolina for Kibera next Wednesday January 13. We will meet and interview Mr. George Kogolla, who runs the program, and look forward to learning about their business and health delivery model. We will keep you posted.