Steady Progress: Community Health Workers in Kisumu Demonstrating Improved Performance

Community Health Workers’ (CHWs) performance is slowly improving in our largest implementation support site of Kisumu, Kenya, following the launch of an impact optimization plan.

CHW Rose takes Leny’s body temperature during a household visit.

For example, under-5 sick child treatments or referrals rose to 9.3 per CHW per month. This represents a 21% increase compared to the previous quarter, driven in part by increased stock levels and capacity building for Community Health Workers’ CHWs on how to correctly diagnose malaria.

However, this is below the target of 16, meaning there is still room for improvement. The rate of on-time postnatal care visits has also steadily improved over the past year to 63% in Q2 versus 53% at the same time last year as CHWs use their digital tools to get timely reminders.

Overall, we attribute these gradual performance improvements to the combined efforts and focus of the government and Living Goods teams’ use of data to drive performance, including daily data monitoring, weekly data review meetings, and action planning together with monthly refresher training programs and improved supervision quality.

We closely engaged with the government to keep supervision, mentorship, and stock levels high which is now at an impressive 72% CHW in-stock rate. We expect further improvements in the coming months as we explore additional initiatives to further ramp up performance.