We ensure solutions are cost-efficient, scalable, backed by evidence, and aligned with emerging global opportunities.
Our unique strength in innovation comes from our collective expertise in community health, our data and digital health capabilities, and a dedicated Innovations Department with locally grounded teams in Kenya, Uganda, and Burkina Faso.
Living Goods operates innovation hubs where we support nearly 4,000 CHWs serving a population of 2.2 million people. These sites enable us to quickly learn what works and generate strong evidence to inform investment and decision-making for governments and others in the community health sector.
While many health innovations struggle to scale, Living Goods stands out by prioritizing sustainable growth and adoption within national health systems. Our strategy is centered on co-designing and co-implementing with our government partners, which means successes can be readily scaled.
Founded in 2001, Charity Navigator has become the nation’s largest and most-utilized evaluator of charities. In their quest to help donors, their team of professional analysts has examined tens of thousands of non-profit financial documents and then used this knowledge to develop an unbiased, objective, numbers-based rating system (for a total of four stars) to assess over 9,000 of America’s most worthy charities. See Living Goods’ award information here.
In 2013, GSK and Save the Children launched the first Healthcare Innovation Award to identify and reward innovations that have proven successful in reducing child deaths in developing countries. Living Goods was honored to be recognized with this award in 2015.
Living Goods and Last Mile Health were recognized with inaugural honorees of the Audacious Project, a collaborative approach to funding ideas with the potential to create change at thrilling scale. Together, Living Goods and Last Mile Health will provide lifesaving healthcare to 34 million people across six countries in East and West Africa by 2021 by deploying 50,000 digitally-empowered community health workers (CHWs).
In 2020, Living Goods was added to The Million Lives Club, which celebrates entrepreneurs and innovators measurably impacting and improving the lives of those living on less than $5 a day.
The Trinity Challenge (TTC) is a coalition of 42 organisations from the private, public, philanthropic and academic sectors, working towards protecting the world from future pandemics, by using data, analytics and digital tools. TTC was launched in September 2020, as part of global efforts to protect one billion people from health emergencies. TTC invited applications from across the world to develop and scale non-medical interventions, in areas such as data science, behavioural science, and economics, which have been areas often overlooked by current COVID-19 interventions.
Living Goods has received a Guidestar 2024 Platinum Seal of Transparency for our program information and brand details.
Welcome to the Living Goods Integrity Line
Living Goods is committed to upholding the highest ethical standards in all our activities. We expect all stakeholders—including staff, contractors, volunteers, interns, freelance consultants, and partners—to act with integrity and accountability.
We acknowledge our duty to act as stewards, ensuring the safety of children, communities, and all those impacted by our work. Moreover, we recognize our duty to foster a conducive environment to realize our organizations’ ambitions and aspirations.
Our Integrity Line provides a safe and confidential way to report concerns and helps us protect the people and communities we serve.
All reports are treated with strict confidentiality, and we maintain a zero-tolerance policy for retaliation against individuals who report concerns in good faith.
If you have any concerns, please make a report through the contacts below:
> Living Goods Ethics Portal – Link
> Email – reports@lighthouse-services.com (must reference Living Goods in the report)
> Integrity Lines;
1. Kenya: 800-603-2869 (Toll Free) | +254 721 611027
2. Uganda: 800-603-2869 (Toll Free) | +256 414 233 063 | +256 392 202 030
3. United States: 800-603-2869 (Toll Free)
Alternative care models, from telehealth to self-care approaches, are increasingly recognized as a critical strategy to achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC). With increasing trends for phone ownership and connectivity across many African countries, our innovation pilots support early-stage exploration of how and where these models can be best integrated within effective and equitable community health service delivery at the last mile. Our priorities in this area include;
1. Advancing “best in class” models for virtual service delivery directly to households to complement and strengthen responsive CHW programming. This includes testing direct to household messaging via IVR and SMS to strengthen clients’ uptake and use of health services.
2. In Kenya, we are testing hybrid models of CHW and telehealth-supported care with virtual providers to improve maternal health and postnatal care services. In partnership with Health X Africa, our pilot demonstrated improved access and greater efficiencies in identifying and escalating care, including 97% referral completion for risks with danger signs. Our next iteration of this design will focus on leveraging an increasingly digitized national health infrastructure and developing an end to end digitized closed referral loop between clients, CHWs, health facilities, and telehealth providers.
3. We are developing our track record of task shifting within the health workforce to the CHW cadre, to improve access to services and health commodities at the last mile. In 2021 and 2022, our innovation to address the leading causes of infant death resulted in the testing and scaling of CHW treatment for childhood pneumonia and CHW-led community management of Possible Serious Bacterial Infections (PSBI) in newborns in Kenya. In Burkina Faso, we are continuing research on the efficiency and outcomes of CHW-led newborn and child assessments and treatments to support the national policy agenda.
In the context of resource-limited settings, we are committed to creating systems efficiencies to enable governments to invest resources with greater impact. Our pilots and quasi-experimental research identify the right approaches to accelerate the optimal performance in the CHW workforce and to improve return on investment for governments and the wider community health sector. Our current portfolio includes:
1. Building evidence on CHW payment mechanisms. In Uganda, an independent study with over 1,000 Living Goods-supported CHWs evaluated the impact of different compensation structures on improving CHW performance, motivation, and retention.
2. Integrating e-learning. In Kenya, we are working with the government to support the testing of virtual capacity building for CHWs, with the intention to scale these learnings and interventions into Uganda and Burkina Faso. These platforms and strategies enable CHW self-paced learning and continuous professional development at lower costs.
3. Developing digital supervision platforms. e-supervision tools support supervisors to provide more responsive and data-driven mentorship and coaching to CHWs.
4. Digitizing community-based surveillance. In Kenya, we are working with Jhpiego to develop a One Health CHW training curriculum and the Busia County Government to build a real-time digitized surveillance platform aligned to the national electronic Community Health Information System (eCHIS), enabling the tracking and triaging of public health threats before they escalate.
We use data, digital and generative AI solutions, or smartphone-enabled diagnostics in the hands of CHWs to improve at identifying at-risk infants and pregnant women, to allow early interventions to ultimately prevent and transform health outcomes. For example, in Uganda we are deploying the use of predictive algorithms to assist in identifying households at risk of defaulting on childhood vaccinations.
We focus on the prevention and treatment of malnutrition in women, infants and children as a leading driver of maternal and infant morbidity. This is linked to postpartum hemorrhage in women and low birth weights in newborns. Our work in Kenya includes early-stage exploration of application of virtual nutrition counselling in last mile communities.
CHWs lead simple household level assessments and risk stratification of clients to ensure a tailored virtual and in person care pathway. We are also testing the use of virtual tools to support CHW assessments and counselling on nutrition in pregnancy and exclusive breastfeeding, as well as compliance to nutritional supplements during pregnancy
Excellence in Giving recognizes Transparency when charities share more data about governance, finances, strategy, and impact than the IRS requires. Each recognized charity has submitted 175 data points about operations and performance for donors to review before making an informed giving decision. Transparency seal recipients voluntarily disclose debt levels, Board practices, 3-year program and financial trends, impact stats, strategic plans, and even an internal S.W.O.T. analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats).