Berlin, Germany
[Remarks as Prepared]
Working Together To Accelerate Community-Based Primary Care Session at the World Health Summit
Thank you, everybody, for missing your lunch and taking time to talk about the Community Health Delivery Partnership. The context: we know now -- the evidence indicates -- to reduce inequities and survival, we have to improve coverage of essential health services. For years, the central premise of the way that has been spoken about and not actually achieved has been that in order to improve coverage, we need strong primary health care at the community level, and that requires clinical workforce and capability and community-based workforce and services. They have to fit together to support one another to successfully produce essential health services. When we do that, we see remarkable gains in life expectancy at every level of income -- the lowest income, middle income, and high income. We are all struggling with how to connect the dots between having a Primary Health Care Clinic, which people don't necessarily go to, and community health services, where community health workers are in the community and seeing people but may not be connected to that clinic, and put them all together so we get impact.
The Community Health Delivery Partnership was launched last year out of almost a decade of work in the Community Health Roundtable, which established advocacy for these basic precepts. The aim was to move from advocacy to also add delivery and coordination where we needed to create it. And in sum one year later, we've made tangible strides. We have much more to do.
At the global level, we have come in behind and coalesced around the WHO Health and Care Compact that establishes what we should be doing to support investment protection capability of health workers at the community level, including community health workers. We also recognize that there is a lack of understanding about these roles, in particular over the role of the community health worker. And as part of this effort, you will see, I'm not sure where available in the room the printouts are, but we are releasing today this Community Health Delivery Partnership Report, with a support of a range of actors who've come together to lay out the data, and the analysis of what are the roles that the community health worker plays? Have they been formalized and accredited? The answer is no.
We have many places that are establishing best practices, and then it lays out the findings in a select set of countries around a legal analysis, identifying opportunities for collective action, specific areas of what the gap is in remuneration, and how some countries, but not all, by far, have made the community health worker eligible for a minimum wage, about occupational protection, including access to PPE, about social protection and the need for formalization of these roles as an integrated part of the health system.
At the country level, we have now created, we have brought together our partners, which includes 25 different multilateral organizations and donors, plus country partners and regional actors, like the Africa CDC and the South Asian Development Corporation, to be partnering around how we advance at the country level. So an example is the Africa CDC as one of CHDP's regional leaders in Africa collaborated with UNICEF as part of its country coordination mechanism to support 20 countries to develop community health worker costed scale up plans. And as part of this, it's included partners coming around, making public our investments and our coordination areas of activities, so that we begin that process in these 20 countries, of being able to track and make transparent what we're doing.
Furthermore, we, as part of what we have heard loud and clear from countries, that they want to be the drivers of donor coordination in their countries, but need technical support and staffing behind that. So now we're working across the Community Health Delivery Partnership to identify those partners will raise their hand, country by country, to be that support staff and technical assistance, and get agreement of the other partners that they will recognize that function to be coordinating in a country capacity that will take work to get everybody to come along behind this. But we see these pathways forward. To hear more about it, I'd like to turn to a video that will tell you more about where we've come with CHDP at one year. We've made strides, and we have a long way to go. Thank you.