In July, we inked an exciting three-year partnership with the Government of Burkina Faso that will improve maternal and child health service delivery by developing an integrated and digitally-enabled community health care system.

Burkina Faso has among the highest rates of U5 mortality in West Africa at over 81%, and 70% of these are preventable deaths occurring in community settings. Living Goods will support the government to reverse this trend by using new digital tools to improve CHW performance and ensure continuity of care at all levels of the health system.

Complementing the government’s commitment to provide the country’s 18,000 community-based health workers—known locally as Agents de santé à base Communautaire (ASBCs)—with training, health commodities and monthly stipends,  Living Goods will support the MoH to develop new digital tools and approaches that enable them to use data to make better decision around community health, including developing financial and technical roadmaps for digitization, and the development of training content to optimize the performance of ASBCs.

As part of this effort, Living Goods has also begun a partnership with Swiss aid organization Terre des hommes Lausanne (Tdh), to support the MoH to build the continuum of care between community and clinical levels and to leverage Tdh’s long experience deploying digital health tools at scale at the facility level in Burkina Faso. For more than a decade, Tdh has been working to improve quality of care at the facility level in Burkina Faso and developed a digital tool at scale (used in 85% of health facilities) to help health workers make accurate diagnoses.