Burkina Faso has one of the highest rates of child mortality in the world, with one child in 11 dying before their 5th birthday. 70% of these are preventable deaths occurring in community settings. Living Goods is supporting the government to reverse this trend by improving CHW performance to ensure continuity of care at all levels of the health system. Despite two coups in one year, we launched our learning site in Ziniaré District in December, where we trained, equipped and deployed more than 200 government CHWs. As a learning site, Living Goods is directly funding and managing all the DESC performance management elements while working alongside government.

In 2022, Living Goods facilitated another cross-country learning trip of MOH officials from Burkina Faso to gain insights from their counterparts in Kenya. They visited operations in Busia and Kisumu counties to see DESC in practice and to better understand how government makes use of data to inform health system planning and disease monitoring.

Together with the government, we will learn from Ziniaré and determine whether to further expand the learning site or shift to implementation support to scale this model to all 18,000 CHWs in Burkina Faso. The launch of the learning site follows our work supporting the development and launch of the country’s eCHIS in partnership with the MOH, Terre des Hommes, Dimagi and other partners, with support from UNICEF, the Global Fund and USAID. The first release of the system focused on iCCM and commodity, patient and CHW management. We supported expansion of the tool to include maternal and newborn health, birth and death reporting and tuberculosis patient management. We shared learnings from using the CHT platform in Uganda and Kenya to shape how the performance management framework was created, and we supported MOH in conducting user acceptance tests with CHWs.

We are learning from our partner Dimagi about the implementation of a tool designed on a different platform, CommCare, than what we use in other countries. We were thrilled that the government involved us in the tool selection process and we continue to work closely with Dimagi and other partners to refine the platform’s design and features. In 2023, we will support building of a CHW supervisor app that will link to the country’s broader facility-level health information system to complement the CHW tool and ensure optimization of CHW performance, quality and timeliness of care.