Earth Institute and Global Poverty Project partner for Community Health Workers

WHAT'S THE ISSUE?

At the Global Poverty Project, we feel it’s unacceptable that clinics and hospitals are too far away for many people, particularly those living in rural sub-Saharan Africa, to access hospitals, clinics and basic medical services such as immunization.

This fact hits people in extreme poverty the hardest. For example, it increases the risk of maternal deaths and infant mortality as midwife services are too far away for women in labour to reach. This means that five mothers in every thousand will die in labour or childbirth related difficulties. On top of this, lack of access to clinics and nurses means that infants are not receiving the vaccines recommended by the WHO, resulting in a 4.8% global infant mortality rate, which is significantly higher in sub-Saharan Africa. It means that too many countries are struggling to meet their millennium development goal commitments on health.

What’s needed is a massive injection of effort and investment to recruit, train, equip and deploy thousands of community health workers to ensure that even hard to reach communities in Africa have access to local professional healthcare facilities.

HOW DID GLOBAL CITIZENS RESPOND?

At the 2013 Global Citizen Festival, global citizens took 75,000 actions on globalcitizen.org calling on major health agencies and telecommunications companies to support the training and deployment of one million community health workers throughout sub-Saharan Africa by 2015.

WHAT'S THE IMPACT?

As a result of both global citizens' actions, our partners support and the spotlight we placed on this issue at the 2013 Global Citizen Festival, we secured the following commitments:

• GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis committed $750,000 each towards community health worker deployment efforts.
• BT pledged $100,000 towards community health worker efforts. Airtel gave free airtime to help cut the operating costs of community health worker programs.
• Ericsson committed free hardware and tech support to community health workers.
• Digicel pledged $500,000 to support the campaign to train and deploy community health workers.
• Joyce Banda, President of Malawi, committed to bringing the number of community health workers from 10,000 to 27,000 in her country.
• The GAVI Alliance committed to support community health worker programs in recipient countries.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

In the coming months, we’ll be giving all we’ve got as a movement to call on world leaders to fully replenish the GAVI Alliance. Replenishing the fund is critical to ensure we continue to drive down the number of vaccine preventable deaths. Additionally, fully replenishing GAVI’s resources means that they will have sufficient funding to invest in community health worker efforts, which will benefit the long term sustainability and efficiency of child immunization programmes as well providing effective local professional health care services where they are needed most. But GAVI can only invest at this level if the world commits all the funds they need to continue their life-saving work for a further five years. As you can imagine, this is an exciting opportunity for global citizens to make a tangible difference and we’re planning a range of opportunities right now for them to support GAVI.