Exploring Partnerships

Scaling our Impact Through Governments and Partners 

Living Goods aims to improve the health of 25 million people by 2021. To reach that goal, we help others learn from and adapt our proven approaches.

• Over the past 10 years, Living Goods has developed extensive expertise in building networks of motivated and effective CHWs in both Kenya and Uganda.
• Initially, our focus was on solving the problems of keeping CHWs motivated and in stock of medicines at a low cost, and therefore developed an entrepreneurial, income-generating component of our model.
• After an RCT showed a 27% reduction in child mortality in the areas where our CHWs were working, we were able to significantly scale our operations in Uganda, expand our operations into Kenya, and support governments and other implementing partners through technical assistance to extend this tremendous health impact.
• We have audacious goals to reach 25 million people by 2021. But, in order to achieve transformational impact in community health, we cannot go it alone.
• By supporting and advocating for governments and partners to adopt our proven approaches toward digitally-enabled community health workers, we will achieve large-scale, sustainable impact.
• Living Goods is committed to working directly in communities and in collaboration with governments and implementing partners to strengthen community health systems across the developing world.  We leverage an integrated technology platform to address the most pressing health needs at the community level—including early childhood diseases, pregnancy, and newborn care, family planning, malnutrition and immunization—which can be adapted to fit a range of contexts. We draw on our extensive experience in service delivery, development and implementation of digital solutions, data-driven decision- making, performance management, and health financing to support governments and partners to address some of the biggest challenges in delivering high-quality care in the community.  At Living Goods,we aim to ensure our community health workers are digitally-enabled, equipped, supervised, and compensated (DESC):
  • Digitally-Enabled: Designing, implementing and scaling context-appropriate digital solutions to ensure the delivery of consistently high-quality care at the community level.
    • Ensuring that community-level data is high quality, verifiable and easily accessible at every level of the health system.
  • Equipped: Ensuring that CHWs have access to supplies of essential medicines and digital resources they need to succeed.
  • Supervised: Increasing accountability of supervisors and managers in primary healthcare to ensure CHWs are adequately supported.
  • Compensated: Effectively compensating, motivating, and empowering community health workers.

Helping Partners Adopt Best Practice Mobile Tools

Living Goods aims to promote the widespread adoption of digital tools for health systems across Africa and Asia. The software we co-created with Medic Mobile and use at scale is open source without any licensing fee to any government or NGO partners supporting CHWs. The workflows and dashboards are modular, so they can easily be adapted to existing platforms.

At the same, we realize that the needs of many countries and partners may be better served by other platforms such as ONA’s OpenSRP and CommCare, and that powerful new technology is continuously emerging and evolving. With that in mind, we’ve developed expertise in the full range of best-practice software solutions available for community health and can advise partners on the combination of tools best suited to their context. We can also help with configuring and deploying solutions in the field, to ensure they work effectively in practice. Contact us to discuss how we might help you.

How We Help Partners Achieve Community Health Goals

Community Health Strategy and Policy Development: Drawing on over a decade of proven impact, we help governments and implementing partners develop and execute detailed community health strategies. For example, in Kenya’s Kisii County, we have been facilitating the drafting, internal discussions, and endorsements needed for a community health bill with the County Assembly, which will help ensure that community health services are legally supported and that CHWs are compensated. We have also been supporting the Ugandan Ministry Health (MOH) to strengthen its community health workforce since 2016, with direct technical assistance and facilitation support to the current Village Health Team program. We’re also working in lockstep with the MOH to support the development of the first National Community Health Strategy and driving advocacy efforts for universal health coverage.

Budgeting/Costing: We help national and sub-national governments understand how much their community health programs and digital health solutions cost, and support them to include relevant costs into the budgeting process. In partnership with the Ugandan MOH, Accenture Development Partnerships, and other stakeholders, Living Goods developed a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) tool to support the MOH to articulate the value and real costs associated with implementing community-based mHealth solutions. The CBA tool is dynamic, customizable, and outlines key drivers for implementing community-based mHealth for data collection, clinical service delivery, and education and training. We can also help craft investment cases to help articulate the value of community healthcare and attract much-needed funding.

Digital Health Systems: We are technology agnostic, and have extensive expertise working with more than 10,000 CHWs in two countries developing and implementing a range of digital health tools for CHWs and their supervisors. We can help governments and implementing partners select, design, configure, and implement digital solutions that best meet local needs. We understand that technology alone is not sufficient to deliver health outcomes, and so support partners to develop the ‘wrap-around’ services to build the systems and processes needed to ensure the technology is repaired and maintained, users adopt and own the system, and that the data is accurate and verifiable. We support Ministries of Health to strengthen their national health management systems through deliberate efforts to improve community data collection, reporting, and use across all levels of the health system. Living Goods is collaborating with the Kenyan and Ugandan Ministries of Health to ensure that accurate, timely, and complete data is being transmitted from our Smart Health app into their national DHIS2 systems. We are also providing technical assistance to create and utilize supervisory dashboards and document learnings around the entire integration process.

Design and Implement Performance Management Systems: Performance management is at the core of how we deliver impact. Living Goods can co-create a best-in-class performance management system helping supervisors and managers at every level of the health system to improve the performance of the community health system. We effectively utilize technology and our knowledge of different types of incentive structures to integrate people, data, metrics, targets, accountable supervision, and compensation.

Quality of Supervision: We believe that supervision is essential to the motivation and capacity of community health workers to deliver quality health services, day-in and day-out. Living Goods works with partners to develop effective supervision tools, including digital tools and provides training and ongoing coaching and mentoring to ensure that supervisors understand how to utilize data to improve the quality and consistency of supervision. We also support their managers to better monitor and improve the quality of supervision over time. Our advisors can be based at national, regional and field level providing support to the teams and ensuring effective implementation of new systems. 

Supply Chain Strengthening. We currently manage a supply chain in Kenya and Uganda that enables CHWs to be 100% in-stock of essential medicine through warehousing, distribution, and commodity quantification, and can support partners to strengthen their supply chains. We have refined processes to minimize shrink and increase transparency, which includes electronically tracking commodities, using data to forecast demand, and track stock-levels at the last mile. We can support governments and implementing partners with insights to ensure that CHWs accessing essential medicines from the public sector supply chain are always in-stock with essential medicines.

Innovative Financing Approaches: Living Goods designed and created one of the first results-based financing (RBF) mechanisms for CHWs in Uganda—this is a neutrally managed outcomes fund through which multiple donors can pool resources to pay for independently verified, guaranteed results. For the RBF, we leverage our technology and real-time performance data to create the accountability needed to crowd in additional resources from governments and donors who want to have more oversight and transparency on how their funding is spent. Similarly, we are working closely with the Isiolo County government in Kenya, where we have been directly contracted by the county through a co-financing arrangement to manage all of their community health services for four years. This is allowing us to facilitate a shift towards increased domestic resource mobilization while giving us the opportunity to strengthen the regulatory framework around the contract to mainstream this type of innovative financing arrangement. In this way, Living Goods is supporting governments and donors to create structures for more sustainable financing for community health in the long-term.    

In-Kind Financial Support: With support from The Audacious Project, Living Goods plans to invest over $100 million in direct and technical assistance to help deploy over 30,000 technology-enabled CHWs by 2021. A substantial portion of this funding is unrestricted regarding what countries it will be deployed in, and Living Goods will seek to allocate it where the need is high, the local commitment to community health is clear, and local governments commit to increasing their investment in CHWs.