Ethiopia

We are supporting the Ethiopia Ministry of Health to strengthen the National Health Extension Program in order to ensure equitable access to essential health services and improve the quality of health services.

Country Snapshot

Ethiopia is the second most populous country in Africa, with an estimated population of approximately 100 million people. Ethiopia has seen rapid economic growth and remarkable progress improving health outcomes over the past two decades, including eliminating neonatal tetanus and decreasing under-five mortality. Despite this progress, Ethiopia still has a large burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases, nutritional disorders, and maternal and neonatal conditions.

Rural Population

79%

Child Mortality

51 per 1,000 live births

Maternal Mortality

401 per 100,000 live births

Basic Vaccine Coverage

40.2%

HIV Prevalence

0.9%

Health Worker Coverage

0.1 doctors per 1,000 people

*Sources: The World Bank Group, World Bank Open Data, www.data.worldbank.org; Ethiopia Mini Demographic and Health Survey, 2019, https://dhsprogram.com/pubs/pdf/FR363/FR363.pdf

Our Work

We developed a formal partnership with the Ethiopia Ministry of Health in 2019 to grow and strengthen the community health workforce. The country’s flagship Health Extension Program, composed of over 40,000 community health workers, known locally as health extension workers, is recognized as a global leader in expanding access to primary healthcare in remote and rural areas. The Ministry of Health has asked partners like Last Mile Health to expand access to training via digital tools for these community health workers, in order to increase their knowledge and decision-making capacity.

Together, we are working to scale up integrated in-service digital training on reproductive, maternal, neonatal, and child health, starting with a pilot of a blended learning module to more than 1,000 community health workers operating across 20 districts serving 2.9 million people. In response to the pilot study’s promising results, the Ministry plans to develop additional blended learning modules–and to implement the first module in more districts, reaching a greater number of Ethiopia’s 40,000 community health workers.

We are supporting the Ethiopia Federal Ministry of Health to:

LEVERAGE FRONTLINE HEALTH WORKERS IN THE COVID-19 RESPONSE

We partnered with the Ministry of Health and the Ethiopian Public Health Institute to develop and launch the Ministry’s first-ever digital learning platform. The COVID-19 Ethiopia – Health Worker Training Platform is providing community and frontline health workers with up to date, high-quality educational content on COVID-19.

TRAIN HEALTH LEADERS

Through our Community Health Academy and a partnership with the International Institute for Primary Health Care-Ethiopia, we are providing blended learning opportunities for health leaders to grow their expertise to effectively manage community health systems.

DESIGN, DIGITIZE & DELIVER IN-SERVICE TRAINING

We are working to scale up blended, integrated in-service digital training for up for community health workers across the country, starting with a module on reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health.