One Million Community Health Workers

The One Million Community Health Workers (1mCHW) Campaign has launched the Operations Room!  The Operations Room is a web-based information dashboard that tracks Community Health Worker (CHW) operations across rural low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa.  The overall goal of the Operations Room is to provide information on CHW counts, population coverage and basic workforce analytics. The Campaign actively seeks to collect on-the-ground information about CHW operations, ensure rapid sharing of information, and to provide partner organizations with the resources and data required to effectively manage and allocate resources for CHW scale-up initiatives.

Although many governments and organizations have district-level CHW counting mechanisms in place, the information may not be accessible or organized for effective decision-making.  Moreover, many e- and m-health initiatives are still rather nascent.  Counting mechanisms must be coupled with qualitative information such as the amount and quality of training received, certification levels, etc. Without both the number and capabilities of CHWs, the global health community will not be able to gauge true gaps in human resources for health (HRH).

The Operations Room is currently in Phase 1 of a 3-phase development plan. Phase 1 includes basic counts and capabilities of CHWs that have been supplied by governments and civil society organizations, as well as their current engagement status with the 1mCHW Campaign. In Phase 2, the Campaign will work with partners to identify indicators that can serve as global standards for CHW reporting.  This will be accompanied by the installment of a CHW Deployment e-Toolkit of vetted operational and managerial resources to support field managers who are directly responsible for scale-up. Phase 3 will include the implementation of a database with real-time quantitative and qualitative information on CHWs, thereby empowering governments and partners to prioritize and allocate resources appropriately while creating a platform for field level feedback.

If you have access to programmatic information about public, private, or NGO-operated CHW programs in sub-Saharan Africa, complete the online registration form to have it included and identified on the Operations Room map. You will be making a major contribution towards achieving the goal of one million CHWs in sub-Saharan Africa.

Please submit information regarding CHW programs using this online registration form. The registration form is also available in French.  (Please use a separate registration form per program, per country).  Completing the survey should take only fifteen minutes of your time.

Be counted in the effort to transform health care systems in sub-Saharan Africa!

For questions about the Operations Room, please contact Sharon J. Kim at:  sjkim@ei.columbia.edu.