Since 2019, Living Goods has co implemented community health alongside county governments in Kenya as a key strategy for building community health systems that perform, and will keep performing long after our partnership has ended. We’ve learned a great deal since then about what works and what’s needed to drive deeper, more sustainable impact at scale. In Bungoma, Kenya, we’re now testing an optimized implementation support model that will do just that.

What’s staying the same?

The heart of co-financed implementation support is not changing, we are working hand in-hand with government partners to manage and fund high-performing community health programs. Our focus remains ensuring every family can access high-quality, affordable healthcare no matter where they live. We are strengthening public community health systems so governments can lead and maintain them in the long-term.

What’s changing? What’s changing is how we deliver support to governments. In particular, we’re focused on evolving our government partnerships and improving supervision and digital system management. This means:

• Clearer roles and responsibilities for Living Goods and governments that are established from the start and evolve year over year, with defined impact milestones and exit plans attached.
• Upskilling Living Goods staff to ensure key capabilities are embedded at the right level of government, enabling best practices to cascade throughout the system.
• Ministry of Health trainers will lead all CHW training, with Living Goods focused on enhancing curricula, with an emphasis on performance management.
• A greater focus on equipping sub-national Ministry of Health teams to effectively lead and manage digital systems.
• Integration of new digital and data tools, including a Next-Generation Supervisor App and intelligent dashboards, to help supervisors and county leaders understand and act on the data that drives health impact.

Why Bungoma?

Bungoma was selected based on our scoping criteria – high levels of child and maternal mortality, strong government co-financing commitment, and readiness for partnership. Learnings will shape how the revamped model rolls out across all our implementation support sites, including Burkina Faso later this year and potentially in new countries.

Why now?

Implementation support is a key driver of scale in Living Goods’ new strategic plan, which marks our evolution from proving that government-led community health works to helping governments scale and sustain it. As governments across Africa are making historic commitments to community health, and as global health funding declines, the stakes for translating these commitments into results for families have never been higher.