With a background in community nutrition, a distinguished volunteer record, and experience working as a community health supervisor, Living Goods’ peer coach Amina Tirfe is excelling at her new role in supporting Isiolo County’s community health supervisors to master data-driven performance management.

Amina joined Living Goods in 2019 and became a peer coach in 2021 when the Isiolo County government hired enough supervisors to cover the entire county—filling a staff shortage Living Goods was helping the county to surmount. Amina embraced this change and views her new mentor role as a surefire way to equip the county to manage its own community health system long-term.

“When I do my work, I know I’m helping to drive sustainability in my county,” says Amina. “I enjoy great working relationships with the county teams. Whether we are in the field visiting clients or in a boardroom reviewing reports, I’m always excited to see the supervisors incrementally owning the process and using data to make decisions,” she shares.

Born and raised in Kenya’s arid northern region, Amina began her career in 2014 as a newly graduated nutritionist volunteering to provide nutrition counselling at the largest public hospital in Isiolo.

Determined to be part of the solution in combating the rampant cases of malnutrition among young children in the county, Amina worked with government supervisors and CHWs to educate, track and follow-up patients. She believes her current role as one of six peer coaches in Isiolo is a natural progression to these earlier efforts in promoting accessible community-based health care for families.

“Amina has walked with us and showed us how to effectively use digital technology and support CHWs to do the same, which is especially important for a vast and semi-arid region like Isiolo, where managing large numbers of CHWs can be difficult,” says Mary Mwirigi, a government supervisor in Isiolo.

Through her work, Amina is helping deliver higher quality digitized health services to about 9,000 households by mentoring 7 government supervisors who collectively oversee approximately 140 CHWs. She hopes to do even more by seeking opportunities to grow her skills and share her knowledge.

“Being a supervisor and peer coach has energized my desire to train people on nutrition and other health issues,” she muses. “Plus, I always wanted to be a medic, so who knows? Maybe I’ll go back to school and study to become a clinician and use my community and facility experience to make an even bigger difference.”