Dr. Beatrix Atieno on Building Economic Opportunities for Families Living with Sickle Cell Disease
Published: 30 Jul 2026
Dr. Beatrix Atieno still remembers the boy she guessed was ten or eleven. He was actually nineteen, stunted by years of untreated sickle cell crises, and had stopped going to school because he kept falling sick. His parents had simply run out of options. And Beatrix couldn’t shake this off.
Sickle cell isn’t distant for her either. She carries the trait herself, and has lost two adult siblings to the disease. Now, she’s a medical doctor working in public health with the Kenyan government.
She’s channeling those experiences into her registered NGO, Hala Equity Heroes, to help families of those living with sickle cell build an income of their own, addressing a gap that aid and medication alone don’t cover.
“It’s expensive to be poor. The healthcare system really makes it hard for the underprivileged, particularly for families caring for loved ones with chronic illnesses like sickle cell disease.” she says.
Her Path Into Medicine
Beatrix missed medicine by a point out of high school and was admitted to a Bachelor of Science in Horticulture instead. Repeated university strikes stalled her there for three years, so she quit and reapplied to medicine-adjacent programs across Kenya.
At one point, a postal officer processing her application told her she might never be admitted because of her ethnic group, and suggested she try private institutions instead. True or not, the comment stuck with her.
She looked beyond Kenya’s borders, to Uganda and Tanzania, where medicine admission required completing Form 5 and Form 6. She enrolled in an accelerated pre-university program in Tanzania, completed it, and was admitted to study medicine there.
“Sometimes the path to your dream is not the one you originally planned, but persistence can still get you there,” she says.
Practicing medicine reshaped her focus. Treating patients one at a time, she felt something wasn’t working.
“These people are actually coming to the hospital for something that could have been prevented,” she realized, and that led her back to school to study public health.
Finding the Gap
That shift toward prevention led her to volunteer with Helpster Charity, an organization that covers medical treatment for underprivileged children excluding chronic illnesses, since a chronic diagnosis means ongoing costs the charity’s funds can’t sustain.
Working in the community, Beatrix kept encountering sickle cell patients. And to make it worse, Kenya’s national health insurance system has grown more expensive and less reliable for chronic illness patients.
“I remember a mother telling me they just wait for the child to get a crisis,” she recalls. Then the cycle repeats: fluids and medication, sent home, and wait again.
She knew the pain a little herself. She gets severe joint aches she believes are only a fraction of what a full crisis feels like.
“I can’t imagine what it feels like for a five year old getting five times that pain,” she says.
That image, alongside everything sickle cell has already taken from her own family, is what moved her from treating patients to building something for them instead.
Building Something New: Hala Equity Heroes
Very few community based organizations want to take on sickle cell specifically because funders are drawn to programs like malaria, HIV, or gender based violence, causes with more visible, quicker returns.
Even the NGOs that do show up, she’s noticed, often train health workers to recognize sickle cell and then leave before individuals actually get screened.
People feel they’ve already supported those regions through malaria organizations, even though those organizations were never built to address sickle cell. On paper, the region looks covered. In practice, families still have nowhere to turn.
That gap is what Beatrix set out to bridge, building an NGO for sickle cell families in western Kenya, one that treats financial strain as a real barrier to care, not a side issue to the disease itself.
An Income First Model
Handing a family money or medication solves today’s problem, but it doesn’t outlast the organization that gave it. Once the funding runs out or the NGO moves on, a pattern Beatrix has watched play out across the sector, the family is right back where it started.
Her organization takes a different approach: helping caregivers organize into groups, ten at a time, and develop sustainable income generating projects like agriculture or small businesses, whatever a feasibility study in their region shows can work.
“Medication alone doesn’t help much if a family still can’t afford nutrition or school fees for the same child.”
She teaches financial planning and supports each group until the business breaks even, a milestone that can then help the next group qualify for a small bank loan, guaranteed by the group before it, rather than waiting on outside donors.
“We don’t have to wait for foreigners to bring us money, we can pool resources as a community,” she says.
A Safe Space, By Accident
One change she’s already made is where care happens. Rather than requiring families to travel to larger hospitals, Beatrix arranges for doctors to come to the village instead.
The waiting time around those visits has become something else entirely: many caregivers quietly carry depression, and now they have a chance to sit together and simply talk.
“So many of them go through things they’ve never had anyone to talk about, and creating that safe space does something to them even beyond medicine or psychotherapy,” she says.
Looking Beyond Kenya
She also sees collaboration as key to advancing sickle cell care more broadly. Countries like Nigeria, Tanzania, and Malawi face many of the same struggles she does, often without knowing what others have already figured out.
Answers that already exist somewhere on the continent could speed up care everywhere else if countries stopped working in isolation.
The nineteen year old sickle cell warrior Beatrix met, stunted by years of untreated crises, represents what happens when a family runs out of options. Changing that outcome is what Beatrix is working towards through her organization, Hala Equity Heroes. She believes that with the right support, early and sustained, stories like his don’t have to repeat.
She is just getting started. This work carries everything she’s lived through, and her determination that other families won’t have to.
