Harmonization In Action - Community Health Workforce strengthening

World Vision's approach to strengthen community health programmes through collaboration

The rapid scale-up of the community-based health workforce has been recognized as a global priority for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including target 3.8 to achieve universal health coverage (UHC), in the hardest-to-reach communities and in countries experiencing acute health workforce deficits. A frontline community health worker (CHW), well trained and supported, can provide essential health services to communities that otherwise would have limited access to these services. However, the grassroots approach to support CHWs has led to overwhelming diversity of health systems in communities. Fragmented implementation of CHW programmes by NGOs and donors impedes country ownership and efforts to fully unlock the potential of the CHW workforce in helping to end preventable maternal and child deaths, fight infectious disease pandemics and non-communicable diseases, ensure access to family planning and ensure global health security.

As we enter the SDGs era, with the objective of the UHC goal in mind, we must redouble our efforts to reach the unreached, working in the most challenging contexts to build resilient and responsive CHW systems – requiring policymakers, communities, health workers, NGOs, donors, advocates, and researchers to realise effective collective action. In November 2013 at the Third Global Forum for Human Resources for Health in Recife, Brazil, multiple NGOs, donor agencies and governments signed the Joint Commitment to Harmonized Partner Action for Community Health Workers and Frontline Health Workers. In this session, we will examine opportunities and challenges to implementation of this commitment – including examining models and learning from globally recognised experts about tools and approaches being used to translate the harmonization commitment into action. This skills-building session The session will include a combination of case studies, debate and interactive workshops in which tools, methodologies and experiences for promoting harmonization are shared. There will be a panel debate including leading NGOs and donors and highlight the bottlenecks that remain in achieving collective action for CHWs. 

Take The Harmonization In Action Test   https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Harmonizationinaction

Resources to promote harmonized partner action:

Questions?  Contact health@wvi.org