Topics

Community Health

Communities should be involved in all aspects of the health care available to them—from the way health services are designed and delivered to how they’re managed and overseen. That’s why we advocate for communities to help choose and support their community health workers, for linking paid frontline workers with community volunteers, and for using technology to optimize health services and make health systems accountable to the populations they serve. Through our context-specific community mobilization strategies, we help countries provide their people with the care they need, where they need it.

Our key approaches include:

  • Forming community partnerships to define and monitor the quality of health services
  • Partnering with mentor mothers, lay health workers, and others through client engagement models that help deliver essential services
  • Using service outreach models—such as our male circumcision campaigns and mobile family planning services—to reach clients at the community level
  • Engaging community leaders, religious leaders, and other influencers to promote health services and behavior change

Selected Achievements

Partnered with imams, journalists, and civil society members (who have since visited 14,000+ households) in Senegal to dispel myths around family planning and make services more widely available.
Built working relationships between police officers, teachers, social welfare workers, and frontline health workers to combat gender-based violence in Tanzania.
Improved the health of mothers and babies throughout rural India through technology and training for community-based midwives and accredited social health activists.
Established 230 mothers’ support groups for HIV-positive women at facilities in Ethiopia offering PMTCT services—the groups have increased uptake of antiretroviral prophylaxis (98% among pregnant mothers and 96% among infants).
Provided fistula-related training for over 4,000 health workers and over 2,300 community volunteers in Ethiopia.