Community-Led Health

We Catalyze Communities to Tackle the Multi-Dimensional Drivers of Poor Health

Core to our model is the transformation of traditional birth attendants to professionalized Community Health Workers. Traditional birth attendants are women in the community who have delivered healthcare to their neighbors for generations. But, because they have been cut off from formal health systems, the home births they provide are often dangerous for mother and baby. We transform these women from the formal health system’s greatest competitor, to its greatest champion.

Communities

We organize community committees to launch their own holistic health initiatives and participate in the governance of community and primary levels of health care. Community committees advance rights and hold health systems accountable.

Community Health Workers

We recruit, train, pay, supervise, and digitally empower transformed traditional midwives and government community health workers to extend high-quality care to every home. Our community health workers track pregnancies, encourage facility deliveries, ensure on-time immunizations, test and treat common childhood illnesses, provide contraceptives, and connect clients to health centers.

Data

Real-time mobile data capture and robust population-level surveying enables our team and government policymakers to make evidence-based decisions. We’re building systems to drive analysis at all levels, from frontline workers to government officials.

Health Centers

We provide onsite quality improvement support and training to government health facilities. This support is built around the World Health Organization’s six building blocks of health systems: service delivery, health workforce, information systems, supply chain, finance, and governance. Our approach emanates from our center of excellence – Lwala Community Hospital.

“Being a traditional birth attendant, we didn’t have a lot of things to help mothers. We worked barehanded without protection. If there was difficulty, hospitals were not near for help so it often led to death. Getting trained as a Community Health Worker affected my life greatly – we were told the dangers of giving birth outside of the facility, and it reduced the mortality of the women and the babies.”
– Leah, one of Lwala’s first Community Health Workers, and a former traditional birth attendant.