Kenya Participates in 1 Million Community Healthworkers Campaign

Community Health Workers (CHWs) are proven effective for achieving universal health coverage (UHC) in resource-constrained settings. CHWs are a relatively low-cost health intervention with recognized success in disease surveillance and prevention, vital events registration, timely provision of life-saving curative treatments, and patient referrals to health facilities. They played a pivotal role in helping the governments of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone respond to the Ebola outbreak by serving as ‘Contact Tracers’ (CTs) to quickly identify cases, facilitate immediate referral and quarantine, and monitor contacts for the 21-day incubation period of the disease, thereby preventing further spread of the epidemic. As trusted members of the community, CHWs are instrumental in promoting health awareness, reducing stigma, and fostering treatment-seeking behaviors across disease areas. The 1mCHW Campaign aims to close the universal health coverage gap in sub-Saharan Africa. They aim to achieve this through: advocating for the recognition of CHWs as a formal cadre of health workers; providing technical assistance to governments seeking to enhance and scale-up nationally recognized CHW programs; urging financing organizations to support CHWs; and motivating countries to demand this support from donors. To have ample representation for Kenya at a key CHW workshop, funding was needed.