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March 28, 2021
Living Goods is thrilled to announce that we’ve just embarked on a partnership to support the Ethiopian government’s drive to massively scale the digitization of its community health workforce, known locally as Health Extension Workers (HEWs). In collaboration with JSI Research & Training Institute (JSI), the lead partner, and Dimagi, Living Goods will help strengthen and accelerate performance management as the Ethiopian Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH) scales its electronic community health information system (eCHIS) beyond the 1,500 HEWS it currently supports. Through the eCHIS Scale-up for Improving Performance of the Health Extension Program that JSI is leading, digital health services will be extended to support 8,000 HEWs and 3,520 of their supervisors—supporting 160 woredas (districts). We are grateful to the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation for jointly designing this critical initiative with the Ethiopian FMOH. 
Ethiopia has achieved significant improvements in delivering maternal and child health services at the community level since the inception of its Health Extension Program (HEP) in 2003, though it still has challenges relating to efficiency and productivity. Working under the leadership of the Ethiopian FMOH and JSI, Living Goods’ role will be to assess existing performance management processes and systems within the HEP, and propose and test an improved performance management system, while Dimagi will focus on developing data insight tools and technology. Robust performance management ensures the optimization of community-level service delivery and supervision, which will result in more equitable access to health services at the last mile and improve health outcomes for Ethiopia’s 110 million people.
Living Goods anticipates working with about 500 HEWs and 50 supervisors to test and document approaches in three learning sites by 2023. Over time, the FMOH and JSI will leverage the learnings from our tests to inform how they scale these services to the additional HEWs and supervisors supported through the initiative. This effort will play a key role in helping the Ethiopian FMOH deliver on its strategy of leveraging technology and data solutions to improve health service delivery for the people of Ethiopia, by ensuring data is used for decision-making to improve health outcomes.
We are grateful to all of you who continue to support us to realize our vision—a world where every family can easily access the healthcare they need to survive and thrive.