[Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso— July 7, 2021]  Living Goods is delighted to announce a 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 under-five mortality in West Africa (87.5 deaths per 1,000 live births) caused by malnutrition, acute respiratory infections, malaria, diarrhea, and neonatal infections—with 70% of these preventable deaths occurring in community settings. In collaboration with other like-minded organizations like Terre des hommes Lausanne, Living Goods will support the government to improve these statistics by strengthening its existing foundation of digital tools to ensure the continuity of quality primary health services at both community and facility levels.

This effort will build upon the significant progress Burkina Faso’s Ministry of Health (MoH) has made over the last five years to invest in digital health and reduce maternal and child mortality by designing and implementing a context-specific digital health tool for the country’s 18,000 community-based health workers—known locally as Agents de santé à base Communautaire (ASBCs)—and their supervisors.

Complementing the government’s commitment to provide ASBCs with training, health commodities and monthly stipends,  Living Goods will support the MoH to develop new digital tools and approaches that enable the use of data for decision-making for 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 Terre des hommes Lausanne (Tdh), the leading Swiss organization for children’s aid, to support the MoH to build the continuum of care between community and clinical levels and to leverage long experience of Tdh in deploying digital health tools at scale 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 (in 85% of the health facilities) to help health workers make accurate diagnoses. Meanwhile, Living Goods has more than a decade of experience digitizing and strengthening health systems at the community level. This collaboration will help bridge the gap between community and clinical care and increase the quality and continuity of health services throughout the entire country.

The partnership with the government of Burkina Faso comes at an opportune time, following the government’s adoption of a National Community Health Strategy (2019 – 2023) that integrates all priority areas in community health, including reproductive health, child survival, food and nutrition, water, hygiene and sanitation, and more.

We expect this partnership will advance the government’s vision to “build a national health system that values prevention and makes the community-based approach to primary health care the foundation of Burkina Faso’s march towards universal health coverage”.