Liberia’s National Community Health Assistant Program
In Liberia, 1.2 million people live in remote areas without access to primary healthcare, which has devastating consequences on health outcomes.
Liberia’s National Community Health Assistant Program is a powerful effort to solve this problem. Following the ravaging Ebola epidemic, Liberia’s Ministry of Health convened a coalition of actors to design a nationwide community health worker program in order to reach every rural and remote community across the country. The Ministry of Health transformed a patchwork of smaller, largely uncoordinated initiatives into a unified, high performing program to provide life-saving care.
Once fully scaled, the program will deploy over 4,000 paid and professional community health workers and clinical supervisors, mainly nurses, in the country’s most rural and remote communities. Led by the Liberia Ministry of Health, the program builds capacity, motivation and accountability across the system – from remote community clinics to national policymakers to international funders.
With support from Co-Impact, the Liberia Ministry of Health and coalition partners including Last Mile Health, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and implementing partners aim to fully scale and sustain this program to provide access to primary healthcare services to 1.2 million people over five years, reducing child deaths by 20%, and serving as a model for other countries with similar challenges.
