The State of Community Health Workers, Country by Country

CHW profiles published for 17 African countries, providing invaluable comparison of program assets, attributes and  bottlenecks.

As the global community has recognized the essential role of Community Health Workers (CHWs) in improving global health and reaching goals, it has become increasingly important to have a shared understanding of the state of the world’s community health workers.  The MDG Health Alliance and a wide range of partners focused on CHWs — including the One Million Community Health Workers Campaign (1mCHW), American Red Cross, UNICEF and  USAID/MCHI — have published country-by-country snapshots of CHW programs across Africa.  The profiles provide important information on numbers of CHWs, services offered, key partners, programmatic design, and barriers to scale up.

The published CHW country profiles, available on the One Million Community Health Workers website and on CCM Centralform a high-level program status guide intended to fill information gaps that exist within countries and between country stakeholders and global partners who are working conjointly to rapidly scale and strengthen CHW programs.

The profiles draw on a range of sources, including data on partner programs collected by the 1mCHW Campaign’s CHW Registration Form, the UNICEF 2013 iCCM surve  and the Advancing Partners and Communities effort.

The information contained in the profiles represents the best effort by partners involved in the work to capture the most accurate information. However, the 1mCHW Campaign and partners recognize that this information will need continual refinement and updating as CHW programs evolve on the ground. Accordingly, the 1mCHW Campaign Field Specialists and members of the iCCM Financing Task Team will work with country stakeholders to revise the profiles over time.  Those interested in suggesting a revision to a country profile should contact Sharon Kim (sjkim@ei.columbia.edu) .