- Illness is universal.
Access to care is not.
And realizing this lit a fire in my soul.
No one should die because they live too far
from a doctor or clinic.
I wish that you would help us recruit
the largest army of community health workers
the world has ever known
by creating the Community Health Academy.
A global platform to train, connect and empower.
(inquisitive music)
- They had a big idea to change the world.
But they couldn't do it alone.
- For my wish.
- I wish.
- So that my wish.
- And now, here's my wish.
- Epidemic diseases like Ebola, HIV, Zika,
emerge from remote, rural communities,
including the rainforests of West and Central Africa.
These are the hotspots of disease.
They're the hotspots of infections.
They're the hotspots of death that are located
in the blind spots of the global health system.
The idea that disease anywhere
can be a threat to people everywhere is very real.
So, how do we stop this?
Well, it's to enable community health workers
to prevent, detect and respond to outbreaks
at their very source.
There are a billion people
who live in the world's most remote communities
and while we've made great advances
in medicine and in technology,
our innovations are not reaching the last mile.
They're not reaching these remote communities.
We launched a non-profit called Last Mile Health
and Last Mile Health's mission is to bring
a healthcare worker within reach of everyone, everywhere.
A community health worker is someone
who lives in one of these communities
that's cut off several days away
from the nearest clinic and they may not have had a chance
to finish even high school.
They're trained to perform medical skills
that can save lives.
Their job is to go door to door to provide healthcare.
- When I was little, I had a passion to help communities.
I loved taking care of children.
So when the community came here to find people,
I put my hand up.
I said I wanted to help the little children.
- What these community health workers like Serena are doing
is trying to bring the kind of healthcare
your family doctor may provide,
but in places your family doctor may never go.
- When I wake up in the morning,
put my bag on my back,
the distances that I walk
is sometimes two hours, three hours in the forest.
Some areas of creeks, they join with the ocean,
so even crossing, you find it so difficult.
- Community health workers are trained
to address the health problems of their own community.
In a country like Liberia,
it could mean helping a mother get treatment for her child
suffering from malaria.
- In Liberia, the children die more than the others,
because we have, some people in the villages,
they don't sleep under mosquito net.
- We already know community health workers
can help healthcare systems save more lives.
Their ability to do that is strengthened
when they're enabled with modern technology.
If community health workers were equipped with smart phones
this would increase their ability
to prevent, detect, and respond to outbreaks and epidemics.
It's time for technology to help reinvent healthcare
on a game-changing scale.
We are building the world's first education platform
for community health workers,
that allow them to see the condition.
There's instruction on the phone to help the worker
decide what treatment to give.
But, equipping 50,000 community health workers
with smart phones is an extraordinary, ambitious effort,
larger than what our organization alone could take on.
It required collaboration.
We realize that working together with other partners,
like Living Goods,
would help us truly solve that problem.
And then, we learned about The Audacious Project.
A new opportunity that TED
and a group of visionary philanthropists
had been working on, to fund
some of the boldest most audacious ideas in the world.
So that's all very exciting,
because many, many more millions of children and families
are now gonna have a chance at getting it,
and they're gonna get it from their own neighbors.
- They say health workers for everyone, everywhere …
Community health workers become the very people
who can make a difference.
— I love children, and I love my community, and my community love me.
I have love and passion for the job, so I will continue to work for my people.
We could, by 2030, save 30 million lives,
by training these workers to do 30 services.
We as people are not defined by the conditions we face,
no matter how hopeless they seem.
We're defined by how we respond to them,
and our response has to demand
a health worker for everyone everywhere.