We’re pleased to announce an exciting new funding partnership with the Innovation Investment Alliance (IIA) to expand our growing network of community health workers (CHWs) in Uganda and support our vision of providing every mother and child across the developing world with life-saving health services.

IIA is a dynamic funding and learning partnership between the Skoll Foundation and USAID’s Global Development Lab, with support from Mercy Corps. IIA aims to create systems-level change across sectors and geographies and draw out lessons on scaling that are applicable to the social enterprise community and inform the ongoing conversation on how to create sustainable impact at scale. To date, IIA has invested $50 million in eight proven, transformative social enterprises to support their path to scale.

Over the course of four years, Living Goods will receive over $1.4 million to propel the widespread adoption of effective community health in Uganda and beyond. With support from IIA, Living Goods will expand overage in Uganda by more than 20 percent—further bridging the gap between high-quality health services and families who need them most. The expansion will be equivalent to 400 new Living Goods CHWs serving a population of nearly 300,000 people. This growth will have a powerful demonstration effect as we chart our path to national scale in Uganda.

Additionally, IIA will support learnings and innovations that will help accelerate progress toward the long-term vision of bringing quality health care to every community. Living Goods will launch and test a number of initiatives designed to increase the health impact, cost-effectiveness, and replicability of our community health solution. This will include the expansion of our nutritional offerings to prevent childhood stunting, launch of a payment-by-results funding mechanism to attract long-term funding for community health, development of new collaborations with implementing partners, and more.

We’ll also further leverage our robust SmartHealth tech platform—the cornerstone of our performance management approach. Working in partnership with Medic Mobile, the team will elevate the platform to better target high-risk patients with tailored care, empower Living Goods branch manager with a new supervisor app to monitor CHWs in the field, and integrate with government data systems.

To achieve the goal of providing every mother and child with high-quality health services where they live, Living Goods must work deeper, broader, and faster than ever before—multiplying our impact through partners and testing bold initiatives that have the potential to strengthen and transform community health systems across the globe. IIA’s innovative funding approach and commitment to cross-learning across the social sector will provide us with critical support as we scale our growth both directly and through partners.