A letter from Last Mile Health CEO Lisha McCormick and President & Chief Program Officer James Nardella
We recently announced two catalytic investments in Last Mile Health’s work totaling $60 million – a $40 million gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, and a reinvestment grant of $20 million over three years from the Audacious Project donor community.
As our Leadership Council wrote in December, this funding represents a dose of hope during an extremely challenging period for global health. For the first time in a century, child mortality rates are projected to rise globally, with an estimated 4.8 million children dying before their fifth birthday. This is unacceptable after so many years of progress.
Last Mile Health exists so that every child and mother has access to a professional community health worker, and continuing this work is more important than ever. Across Ethiopia, Liberia, Malawi, and Sierra Leone, we are seeing the power of networks of care that prioritize the hardest-to-reach, most remote communities. But this work is so much bigger than hiring more community health workers; we are catalyzing a continent-wide shift in how healthcare is delivered and financed, ushering in a sea change for hundreds of millions of patients.
Now, we have the opportunity to leverage these two catalytic investments to advance this work, bolstering our capacity and resilience for the future.
We plan to apply over half of this new funding to resource our current strategic plan in order to serve 56 million people with improved access to healthcare by 2028. The remaining funding will fuel our work for the future, allowing us to remain resilient and in service to the world’s most remote communities in 2029 and beyond.
- Accelerate our strategy – We will direct $30 million, including the full Audacious Project reinvestment along with a portion of MacKenzie Scott’s funding, toward implementing our Closing the Distance strategic plan. This will enable us to actively support 34,000 community health workers to reach 56 million people by 2028, without significantly expanding our organizational footprint.
- These efforts will save an estimated 16,500 children’s lives, and extend access to family planning services for 4.2 million women.
- In addition, we will unlock $450 million in funding through Africa Frontline First (a collaborative initiative co-founded by Community Health Impact Coalition, Financing Alliance for Health, and Last Mile Health) to be distributed across the continent, as a means to elevate the broader community health sector.
- Innovate for patients and providers – We will apply $5 million for strategic and innovative investments that ensure community health workers are not left behind in a rapidly changing technology and development landscape. This funding will support projects on digital health, including AI; health system financing; and research and evaluation efforts aimed at demonstrating the effectiveness of integrated, community-delivered care.
- Seed our future – We plan to set aside $25 million of MacKenzie Scott’s gift as strategic reserves to enable confident future planning, sustained momentum, and impact in 2029 and beyond. Amidst seismic changes to funding flows for global health, this will allow Last Mile Health to remain resilient in service of our work to solve a long-term problem: lack of access to primary healthcare globally.
These one-time investments will be transformational for our mission, and we feel a deep responsibility to steward them as strategically as possible. This is why we’ve intentionally chosen to announce them publicly, and share our deployment strategies transparently.
As we look forward, we know the journey ahead will still be a long one to continue to chip away at the larger systematic problem: lack of access to primary healthcare globally. However the partners who are accompanying us on this journey continue to make progress possible, and we are deeply grateful for their long-term commitment towards community-based primary care as a solution whose time has come. We are deeply honored to do this work together.
In gratitude,
Lisha McCormick, CEO of Last Mile Health
James Nardella, President & Chief Program Officer of Last Mile Health
