ICTworks

Millions of people in rural communities depend upon Community Health Workers for health care. In fact, Community Health Workers (CHWs) provide the world’s most promising health workforce resource for accelerating progress in achieving the health-related Millennium Development Goals.

This raises a key question:

Are we following the most effective route to provide relevant and effective training for CHWs or could we make adjustments that will accelerate the process of training at scale and enable them to intervene more effectively to end preventable deaths and improve the health of populations?

Today, content for healthcare workers is still being developed afresh across multiple projects rather than existing content being re-used and adapted. Here is a list of it. This leads to unnecessary duplication of activity and draws on finite resources – resources that could be used for direct training and evaluation to increase our understanding of good practices.

Given the advances in both print and digital media training delivery:

• Is it time to start focusing on the most common health services CHWs provide and create a set of freely available standardized core of learning resources that could be adapted and translated for use by training institutions, NGOs and others, across multiple CHW projects in multiple countries?
• Can funders of many of the international, cross border CHW initiatives influence a streamlined approach to finding the best learning resources and recommending those materials that have evidenced the highest standards and results for training?

mPowering Frontline Health Workers is hosting a series of events to consider these and other questions relating to CHW information and learning needs. Building on discussions in Washington DC, London, and Nairobi, will be a workshop on the morning of 13th February 2014, in Johannesburg, South Africa, in association with the Praekelt Foundation.

Please RSVP now to join your learned peers in a mid-morning deep dive into CHW training, fortified by a light lunch. Our goal is to see if its possible to create a standardized global training content for community health workers, and if we do build it, who would use it, and how?

Previous events included participants from UNICEF, World Vision, Intel, AMREF, Global Fund, Save the Children, Accenture Development Partnerships, GSMA, Khan Academy, the One Million CHW Campaign, USAID, Qualcomm, Vodafone, the Praekelt Foundation and others.

Will this event include you? Only one way to find out: Apply now!