NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Friday, December 14, 2012

“Community health workers: Now that is a profession that must be compensated.”

That is my paraphrase of Jeffrey Sachs’ response to the question I posed at the mHealth Summit about this issue. Investments in technology to support community health workers (CHWs) must be balanced with the need for volunteer CHWs — which are still the majority in Africa — to be paid in order to have any hope of building a skilled professional corps of these life savers.

Working in the Millennium Villages since 2006, Jeffrey and Sonia Sachs are leading proponents of a program to deploy, train and equip one million CHWs across rural Africa. This effort and its partners are described in Sachs’ article, Breakthrough in Saving Lives in Rural Africa. The scale of the effort is both visionary and challenging to the donor governments who are asked to support it.

These compensation issues are more narrowly focused in the United States. For example, many nurses are not recognized as care providers who can be reimbursed under the Affordable Care Act. We too have underserved populations where innovation and new partnerships are critical to reaching those in need.