The Kenya Vision 2030 presents a strong health component as the Kenyan economic blueprint. It aims to build a prosperous country with a high quality of life. The Kenya Constitution 2010provides for the right to the highest attainable standard of health to every Kenyan, and places a fundamental duty on the State to take legislative, policy and other measures, including the setting of standards, to achieve progressive realization of the rights set out under Article 43, which include the right to health. The devolution of health services in Kenya has been characterised with many challenges. These include strikes by health workers in different counties as well as resignation of some health workers; and, inequitable distribution of available health workforce due to health workers leaving certain counties in favour of others that have better working conditions among others. Kenya currently faces significant challenges in overcoming health worker shortages and low retention, as well as difficulty in attaining equitable distribution of human resources for health (HRH) - particularly in hard-to-reach areas. The distribution of healthcare providers in Kenya has been skewed against many rural areas, with many doctors found in the urban areas and fewer in rural facilities. Devolution presents opportunities and challenges to the health sector that together determine the effectiveness of service delivery and the character of the overall health system.The greatest human resource challenge that the counties have encountered since devolution has been the management of the health workforce. To address this, the Ministry of Healthconstituted a Technical Working Group (TWG) to assist in the development of devolved HRM policies. To this end, the TWG resolved on the need for, and consequently developed a concept note on the establishment of a county HRH unit in the health department specifically to address HR needs. In addition the TWG has harmonized and outlined the specific steps in the process of recruitment and deployment of health workers; developed guidelines for donor supported health workers contracting; developed an incentive framework for attraction and retention of health workers; tracking tool for HRH country commitments; and HRH quality assessment supervision checklist. This document is a combination of these policy guidelines that are a first step towards addressing HRH gaps at the county level.I wish to thank all stakeholders involved in development of these guidelines who included the MOH representatives, County health leadership; Transition Authority (TA), Public Service Commission (PSC), and the USAID funded Human Resources for Health (HRH) Capacity Bridge Project. The MOH wishes to issue these guidelines to the national and county governments towards better management of health workers

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