- In Africa, there are millions of people who live out of
the reach of healthcare.
One out of five children will not reach the age of five.
They will die from malaria, pneumonia,
conditions we know how to treat.
- It does not have to be that way.
- The traditional model for healthcare is people
go to the facility to seek help.
With the community health model,
we take the services to the people.
- The community health worker is a trusted neighbor.
- They go door to door and provide services
that prevent illness.
- It is cheap and yet the impact is immense.
- Right now governments are rewriting their
plans for their healthcare systems.
Question is, will they do it right?
- What it will take is investing in the last mile,
ensuring that every child and family has a
community health worker in their neighborhood
or in their village.
- Are we going to do what's needed to support these
community health workers?
Will we be as brave as they are every day in how we design
the systems to support them?
- Rosaline, how have you been?
- I'm okay
- All right, are you ready to go the field?
- Yeah
- Any pregnant women?
- Yeah, there are around four
(laughter)
- My name is Rosaline, I'm a mother of three and
I'm a community health worker.
You deal with each person the way he or she comes.
They know if I become sick Rosaline is there for me.
- There are millions of people who are looking for
meaningful work and they're ready to care for and
look after their neighbors.
We just need to shift our thinking about who we're
supporting as health workers.
- Investing in community health workers means
insuring that they have the right training.
- I go through the training maybe once every month.
We keep on motivating one another
(singing)
- Imagine being asked to look after 500 people.
You'd probably try to organize who needs what
care and what services.
What we try to do is make that all really
easy with technology.
- The advantage of the phone is to make sure you
don't make errors.
So it guides us.
- They have an application that has profiles for
every person and they're connected to a clinic
with staff that can support them.
- We're co-designing this technology with
community health workers so that community health
can be delivered in a completely different level than before
- This is a way of giving an individual a livelihood
and what we have found is that community health workers
have a high return on investment.
- They've increased access to treatment for malaria,
pneumonia and diarrhea
- There's an increase in the number of
children being immunized.
We're also providing nutrition services as well.
- As a result, more and more children are
living and thriving.
- We don't want to lose children, now I'm trained
and I count myself somebody who can help.
- Every child deserves a fifth birthday and
community health can make that possible.
(bright music)
- The proverbs say that if you want to walk fast
- Go alone, if you want to go far
- Go together.
It's about movement building
- Philanthropy, the government, the public sector
and the private sector, everyone has a role
to play in taking community health systems to scale.
- As leaders and as government, we must work together
to reach every community.
- Our challenge is to take results that are at the
scale of ten million people and deliver that for
a billion people.
- If I go back to the United States and I consider
what sort of healthcare system will reach everyone,
it's a system that looks a lot like what we're doing
in Kenya, in Mali and Uganda.
- If every country in the world invested in their
own community health work forces,
we could save 2.5 million lives annually.
(bright music)
- I'm proud to be a community health worker.
If we continue like this, I think our communities
are going to improve more and more.
- There is no other way of thinking about health.
I've learned to see health as a human right.
That is the premise on which we serve the underserved.
- I think the question we have to ask ourselves
as a human race is as there's more and more
inequality in the world,
are we ready to set up a healthcare system that
can provide just, equal and dignified care to
every last one of us?
- Hey, thanks for watching.
For more on the movement to ensure that all people can access
community based primary healthcare,
check out chwimpact.org