Expanding World Vision's Impact Through Community Health Workers

Community health worker (CHW) programming is one of the largest portfolios in World Vision’s health; nutrition; and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector, with 48 countries operating a wide diversity of CHW initiatives. We continue to work and build partnerships towards strengthening community health systems and the community health workforce, a commitment we made to the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Health Workforce Alliance in Recife in 2013.1 World Vision has also made global commitments to support CHWs, including the Every Newborn Action Plan (ENAP) signed in 2014, in which we have committed to strengthen maternal and newborn care within our CHW programmes to reach 100,000 CHWs in 40 countries by 2020. World Vision has increasingly sought opportunities to work with governments and partners to support harmonisation and scale up CHW programming.

In 2015 the Global Health and Nutrition team undertook a global census of CHW programming activities of 66 national offices (NOs). The purpose of the census was to provide an estimate of the current scale of our work in CHW programming globally, to assist internal monitoring and our reporting on our global commitments. The census results are also used to develop CHW technical capacity statements, grant proposals, and fundraising and marketing resources.

More on WV CHW Programmes - Click HERE. 

Key findings

• Of 65 countries that were approached, 57 NOs responded (88 per cent response rate).
• CHW programming is a core approach for health and nutrition in 48 NOs (84 per cent).
• World Vision is currently supporting approximately 220,370 CHWs globally, more than twice the projected target for 2015.
• World Vision is well on the way to CHW programming at scale, with 34 of 48 NOs reporting that CHW programming is in 50 per cent or more of project sites.
• The ministries of health in 80 per cent of these countries currently have an existing national CHW policy in place.
• Where a national CHW policy exists, World Vision CHW programmes are fully aligned in 65 per cent of cases.
• World Vision directly implements CHW programming in just 25 per cent of the 48 countries; the predominant mode of support is through the provision of technical assistance and capacity building.
• Of our NOs conducting CHW programmes, 81 per cent (n=39) report implementing Timed and Targeted Counselling (ttC) or another form of essential newborn care. Although we have likely surpassed our initial goal of reaching 100,000 CHWs, only two countries include chlorhexidine cord care. Further investigation is needed to determine the exact modes of care and interventions in use to extend evidence-based newborn care interventions into CHW service delivery over the next five years.
• Only 48 per cent of NOs that responded were able to report CHW numbers using complete reporting data through World Vision’s Horizon data collection system, indicating a need for further efforts to standardise reporting amongst the remaining offices and projects.