Nurse and Quality Assurance Officer Diana Dennis in Liberia
As our Within Reach Strategic Plan (FY20–23) comes to a close on June 30, our team is reflecting on the accomplishments of the past four years and committing to sustaining the transformative work of investing in community health workers and the systems that enable their success into our next strategic cycle.
Here are three key milestones we are celebrating:
- We launched three new government partnerships—in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Sierra Leone—and celebrated fifteen years operating in Liberia, where we worked with the Liberia Ministry of Health to scale and sustain the pioneering national community health worker program. Across these four countries, nearly 10,000 community and frontline health workers are now deployed to provide nearly 8 million people with essential primary healthcare.
- In Ethiopia, our innovative blended learning training pilot with the Ministry of Health was a success, improving community health worker skills effectively and affordably. The Ministry has now formally adopted the blended learning approach into the national Health Extension Worker program — meaning all 40,000 of Ethiopia’s community health workers will access this training.
- In Liberia, our reach expanded to serve 4,352 community health workers delivering care to nearly 1 million people — and community health workers now treat 45% of all reported malaria cases in children under five. Liberia’s Ministry of Health recognized Rivercess, Grand Gedeh, and Grand Bassa (where Last Mile Health is honored to implement the program) as the country’s best-performing counties under the National Community Health Program for 2022. We partnered with the Ministry of Health as they hosted the 3rd International Community Health Worker Symposium, culminating in the launch of the country’s new ten-year community health policy and the Monrovia Call to Action.
- In Malawi, we developed and deployed the iCHIS digital health tool in partnership with the Ministry of Health and others, with 1,807 community health workers receiving training thus far. We also collaborated on a health financing advocacy tool to support the Ministry in mobilizing resources for a stronger, more sustainable community health program.
- In Sierra Leone, we partnered with the Ministry of Health and Sanitation to revise the training curriculum for the country’s first fully integrated cadre of community health workers. More than 8,000 newly trained community health workers have now been deployed to all 16 districts, where they will deliver a full package of integrated primary care services to their patients living in rural and remote communities.
- Across our country programs, we worked with government partners to train and protect community and frontline health workers to safely prevent, detect, and respond to COVID-19, underscoring the critical role of the community health workforce in responding to emergencies. In Liberia, in counties where funding remained consistent, routine visits by Liberia’s community health workers held steady during the pandemic.
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Members of the Africa Frontline First team, including representatives from Last Mile Health, Financing Alliance for Health, and Community Health Impact Coalition.
In addition, our global work evolved to focus on overcoming one of the largest systemic barriers to scaling and sustaining quality community health services: financing. In March 2022, Last Mile Health co-launched Africa Frontline First, a collaborative initiative that aims to mobilize innovative financing solutions to generate $2 billion by 2030. This funding will enable the training and deployment of 200,000 professionalized health workers, serving 100 million people across ten African countries. In September 2022, AFF announced a historic Catalytic Fund, housed at the Global Fund with contributions from the Skoll Foundation and Johnson & Johnson, that mobilized $100 million in funds available for professionalized community health workers. This represents the largest fund in history for professionalized community health workers. This work will continue as the cornerstone of our global advocacy strategy in our next strategic cycle.
- Finally, we launched a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategy and roadmap to move us closer to an organization that lives up to our values. This work began with an in-depth DEI training for all Last Mile Health staff totaling over 13 hours on topics such as cultural competency, bias, power, and privilege. To date, over 85% of staff have completed training, and this critical work will continue in our next strategic cycle.
We look forward to building on this foundation through our next strategy, Closing the Distance, which launches on July 1. We aim to deepen our partnerships with the governments of Ethiopia, Liberia, Malawi, and Sierra Leone, with the potential for expansion to one or two additional African countries, as well as expand critical work globally via Africa Frontline First and internally to strengthen our capacity as a values-aligned organization. We look forward to starting this next chapter with the partners, health workers, and patients who make our work possible.
