With the government of Burkina Faso in the process of digitizing and professionalizing all CHWs in the country, officials from the country’s Ministry of Health recently traveled to Kenya to gain insights from counterparts already underway on a similar journey.

The team from Burkina Faso visited Living Goods’ operations in Kenya’s Busia and Kisumu counties, to better understand how CHWs are digitized, equipped, supervised, and compensated (DESC) and the different approaches Living Goods takes in providing support in the country.

Busia is the location of Living Goods’ Kenya Learning Site—an area where we collaborate with government CHWs to deliver community health services and DESC components at a gold standard—and to serve as a testbed for innovation and experimentation. The team of visitors was better able to visualize how the digital tools facilitate quality care and understand how government is making use of the data to inform health system planning and disease monitoring. This is the second visit of this nature that Living Goods has facilitated.

Meanwhile, Living Goods has been working with Dimagi to support the Burkinabe government to develop a community health information system (eCHIS) based on the CommCare platform that will be piloted in the learning site and eventually rolled out to all ~18,000 CHWs in the country, and link with facility-level systems. We just completed a similar effort supporting the Kenyan government to develop an eCHIS on the CHT platform. We will explore the possibility of providing co-implementation support in Burkina Faso beyond Ziniare only after the learning site is fully operational and sufficient context-specific lessons from operating there have been gleaned.