Non-Profits Launch $100-M Fund To Support African Health Workers

A new philanthropic project hopes to invest $100 million in 10 countries, mostly in Africa, by 2030 to support 200,000 community health workers, who serve as a critical bridge to treatment for people with limited access to medical care, Thalia Beaty reported for the Associated Press (AP).

Photo Insert: HIV self-screening conducted by The Global Fund

The Skoll Foundation and The Johnson & Johnson Foundation announced Monday that they donated a total of $25 million to the initiative. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, which will oversee the project, matched the donations and hopes to raise an additional $50 million.

The investment seeks to empower the frontline workers that experts say are essential to battling outbreaks of COVID-19, Ebola, and HIV.

“What have we found out in terms of community health workers?” said Francisca Mutapi, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, who helps lead a multi-year project to treat neglected tropical diseases in African countries.

“They are very popular. They are very effective. They are very cost-effective.” On a recent trip to Zimbabwe for research, Mutapi described how a community health worker negotiated the treatment of a parasitic infection in a young child who was part of a religious group that doesn’t accept clinical medicine.

Ashley Fox, an associate professor specializing in global health policy at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY), said evidence shows community health workers can effectively deliver low-cost care “when they are properly equipped and trained and paid – that’s a big caveat.”

Though the current number of these workers is not well documented, in 2017, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that the continent required 2 million to meet health targets. Many of these workers are women and unpaid, though The Global Fund advocates for some sort of salary for them.

“It’s hard to think of a better set of people that you would want to be paying if you think about it from both the point of view of creating good jobs as well as maximizing the health impact,” said Peter Sands, the fund’s executive director.

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