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Government Partnerships
Living Goods believes that to scale and ensure the sustainability of our impact we must enable governments to adopt high impact elements of our approach and support them until they fully own the system. We avoid short-term projects, focusing instead on creating platforms that can sustainably scale and endure. By deepening our collaboration with national and local governments in Uganda, Kenya, and Burkina Faso we are creating new models for what successful public-private partnerships in community health can look like. Our proven results have influenced policymakers in both countries to expand the range of high-impact health services and treatments that CHWs can provide, and strengthen their focus on developing comprehensive budgets and operational systems.
We develop detailed memorandums of understanding with governments in every county and district in which we operate, clearly defining our shared goals and responsibilities. In a landmark example, the County Governments of Kisumu and Isiolo partnered with Living Goods in the management of their entire community health worker platforms through an innovative co-financing arrangement. We continue to support them to build the internal capacity needed to ultimately lead these efforts independently.
Implementing Partners
In addition to working closely with governments, we have also partnered with numerous implementing partners, including three of the largest in the world. This not only helps them replicate our approaches and methods but also provides us with valuable learnings and insights. Since 2007, Living Goods has supported BRAC in Uganda on health strategy, business planning, procurement, mobile technology, impact, and measurement. We helped secure the majority of the financing for BRAC CHWs for the last decade. Living Goods is also helping Population Services International (PSI) in Myanmar to adapt our approach to improve the impact and sustainability of its Sun Primary Health network. Living Goods helped PSI with every aspect of the system, from financial modeling and impact planning to product selection, sourcing, and CHW recruitment. The network in Myanmar is now viewed as an exemplar in the country and is poised for further expansion. In Zambia, we worked with CARE to design and build a cost-effective health worker platform based closely on the Living Goods approach and supported impact planning, supply chain management, mobile tools, performance management, the hiring of CHWs, and other operational matters.
The Audacious Project
Living Goods and Last Mile Health were named part of the first class of grantees of The Audacious Project, in April 2018. Replacing what was formerly known as the TED Prize, which annually provided $1 million to a leader with bold ideas to help solve some of the world’s most intractable problems, The Audacious Project is a groundbreaking philanthropic initiative that aims to fuel projects with the potential to create massive, global change.
Together, Last Mile Health and Living Goods will deploy 50,000 digitally empowered community health workers (CHWs) to provide lifesaving health care to 34 million people across six countries in East and West Africa by 2021. Not only will this partnership create jobs and expand access to life-saving health care, but we also have the potential to transform community health systems and the delivery of care through digital technology. The Audacious Project is made possible by a coalition of funders including the Skoll Foundation, Virgin Unite, ELMA, CIFF, and The Bridgespan Group. This coalition of funders has committed a $50 million matching grant to the partnership. The funding will be split between Living Goods and Last Mile Health. The organizations will need to secure 1:1 match funding to unlock this catalytic support from The Audacious Project.
Venturing into the Audacious Project
The Audacious Project is made possible by a coalition of funders including the Skoll Foundation, Virgin Unite, ELMA, CIFF, and The Bridgespan Group. This coalition of funders has committed a $50 million matching grant to the partnership. The funding will be split between Living Goods and Last Mile Health. The organizations will need to secure 1:1 match funding to unlock this catalytic support from The Audacious Project.
Global Alliance for Vaccine Initiatives
In July 2018, we entered into an exciting new partnership with Last Mile Health and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. This partnership will improve immunization coverage and equity by adding vaccination counseling and referrals to the package of services CHWs offer to communities. Since CHWs are not allowed to directly provide vaccines, they will instead capture real-time data on the immunization status of every child in their communities and share it with facilities to close coverage gaps. They will also focus on messaging and behavior change to counter barriers to immunization coverage, including a lack of information about what vaccinations are needed and on what schedule, the actual process to get vaccinated, and managing side effects such as fevers. With a smaller group of CHWs, Living Goods and Gavi will work together to identify and test cutting-edge demand-generation strategies that, if successful, can be rolled out across our network. The project is expected to enhance access to immunization services for more than 8 million people by 2021.
In addition to helping CHWs extend immunization at the community level, we’ll also serve as an advisor to governments on how to further scale community-based vaccination programs, roll out new vaccines such as for human papillomavirus (HPV), the leading cause of cervical cancer and help shape immunization budgeting and strategy development.
Community Health Impact Coalition (CHIC)
Too often in international development, implementing organizations see each other as competitors, rather than collaborators. As a member of the Community Health Impact Coalition (CHIC), Living Goods has joined together with 11 other innovative organizations – Amani Global Works, Integrate Health, Last Mile Health, Lwala Community Alliance, Medic Mobile, Muso, Partners in Health, Pivot, Possible, VillageReach, and VITAL Pakistan – to show what is possible through “radical collaboration.” By sharing insights drawn from our collective practitioner experience, Living Goods and the other CHIC organizations are working to create operationally-specific guidance, including the Community Health Assessment and Improvement Matrix, that will catalyze the adoption of high-impact community health design principles by donors, governments and stakeholders across the health space.
Learn more about the Community Health Worker Impact Coalition!
Learn MoreFinancing Alliance for Health
Living Goods was a founding partner of the Financing Alliance for Health, a new partnership that aims to help governments design and fund ambitious, highly effective, affordable, and at-scale health systems, whose initial focus is health systems at the community level within Africa. The Financing Alliance helps governments through in-country secondments and long term support, together with ministries of health and ministries of finance, helping them develop strategies and financing options including finding innovative financing pathways and investments opportunities that utilize the private sector. Living Goods has worked with the Financing Alliance to support the development of investment cases for community health in Kenya and Uganda and works collaboratively in new countries to enable governments to fund national programs.
Aspen Management Partnership for Health
AMP Health is a partnership between multi-sector partners, including the private sector, NGOs, donors, academia, and Ministries of Health (MoHs). AMP Health addresses the root causes of sub-optimal health services at the community level. The partnership also provides a menu of support to MoHs, who have a bold vision for their community health systems, to strengthen management and leadership capacity including placing Management Partners in ministries of health to provide hands-on support to teams. Living Goods has worked closely with Aspen Management Partners in Sierra Leone, Malawi and Kenya to better understand government needs, and provide relevant support to ministries especially in the area of digital solutions for community healthcare.
CARE Zambia [2015–2017]
In early 2015, CARE Zambia partnered with Living Goods to design a system to increase access to affordable health care products and services, including family planning products, for millions of low-income clients through a cadre of CHWs, trained using the Living Goods community health approach. This partnership resulted in the launch of Live Well Zambia, an impact-driven, social business that promotes health, provides access to health products and supports livelihoods in under-served communities, through a network of trained community health entrepreneurs.
Learn More About Our Partnerships
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Why Partner with Living Goods?
- High-impact. A large scale, independent randomized controlled trial demonstrated a 27 percent reduction in under-five child mortality.
- Proven experience collaborating with large, complex implementing partners. We have partnered with BRAC Uganda, PSI Myanmar, Care Zambia, and others to support them to deliver comparable impact. We are also providing technical assistance to Kisii County in Kenya, with a population of 1.2 million, to adopt mHealth solutions and analyze and interpret dashboards to improve the performance management of their CHWs.
- Cost-effective. Living Goods is dramatically reducing child mortality for less than $3 per person annually globally, and even less in certain countries.
- The Living Goods approach is already operating in three countries, reflecting its adaptability to a range of contexts, budgets, and needs, and can operate on any suitable technology platform.
- Innovative. Through our culture of constantly improving we are always testing new operational improvements and programmatic components, including innovations around technology, operations and financing, and incorporating best practices and learnings from other implementing partners.
- Integrated data. Living Goods provides regular data reports to local and national governments and is supporting full integration with DHIS2 in Uganda and Kenya.
- In Kenya and Uganda, we have secured MOUs at the national level and all districts and counties we operate in to serve as a key implementing partner managing government-supported CHWs. We have also won permission from local regulators to expand the list of regulated medicines, diagnostics, and services CHWs can offer, thereby enabling permission for CHWs to offer antibiotics to treat pneumonia and rapid tests for malaria.
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