In November, we were thrilled to launch our new 5-year Strategic Plan: Country Led, Digitally Enabled Community Health: The Next Five Years.

The process of developing the new strategic plan provided us an invaluable opportunity to reflect on our journey and the organization we’ve become, so we can focus on the areas where we think we can make the most significant impact. By 2026, we aim to assist our government partners to drive improved health outcomes for at least 18 million people by supporting 32,000 CHWs in Kenya, Uganda, Burkina Faso and two other countries that are committed to increasing access to high-quality digital-enabled community health care.

We’ll be working through three modes of support to execute the strategy:

• Strengthening service delivery for 6 million people through learning sites that Living Goods directly funds and manages, focusing on rapid innovation and enhancing the effectiveness of approaches to community health.
• Supporting governments to scale for national impact, reaching 12 million people with implementation support that helps to institutionalize best practices of our DESC approach.
• Shaping the enabling environment around policies, financing, and tools for digital technology and data for decision-making, which we do at subnational, national, regional, and global levels.

We’re also investing in three cross-cutting enablers that are essential for success:

• Anchoring on digital tools, data, and disruptive innovation as drivers of impact: We’ll continue prioritizing using appropriate technologies to support governments, CHWs and their supervisors to drive results and data for decision-making.
• Resourcing the plan: Philanthropy remains Living Goods’ primary source of revenue in the short-term. We also aim to catalyze ~$70 million in co-financing over the course of this plan and support increasing global institutional funding for community health and domestic financing.
• Strengthening organizational capabilities: We will focus on our People and Culture, ensuring we have motivated and diverse teams, and strengthening our organizational effectiveness through strong systems, processes, and governance.

As excited as we are, we know there will be challenges along the way, and we’ve purposely set targets we know are going to be tough to achieve. However, we believe we must be bold, given the size and scope of the problem. Given the plan’s ambitious focus on supporting governments to truly own and invest in stronger national health systems, we’ll need to remain and humble as we work to optimize the impact of community health service delivery.