‘She didn’t deserve to die’: Kenya fights tuberculosis in Covid’s shadow

For the first time in a decade deaths from TB are rising, with the curable disease killing 20,000 Kenyans last year. Now testing ATMs' and other innovations are helping to find missing cases'

One day in May last year, Violet Chemesunte, a community health volunteer in Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi, got a call from a colleague worried about a woman she had visited who kept coughing.

She asked if Chemesunte could go round and convince the 37-year-old woman, a single mother to three young children, to seek medical help. She suspected tuberculosis (TB), and feared it might already be too late.