Community health workers at the dawn of a new era: 11. CHWs leading the way to "Health for All".

BACKGROUND: This is the concluding paper of our 11-paper supplement, "Community health workers at the dawn of a new era". METHODS: We relied on our collective experience, an extensive body of literature about community health workers (CHWs), and the other papers in this supplement to identify the most pressing challenges facing CHW programmes and approaches for strengthening CHW programmes. RESULTS: CHWs are increasingly being recognized as a critical resource for achieving national and global health goals. These goals include achieving the health-related Sustainable Development Goals of Universal Health Coverage, ending preventable child and maternal deaths, and making a major contribution to the control of HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and noncommunicable diseases. CHWs can also play a critical role in responding to current and future pandemics. For these reasons, we argue that CHWs are now at the dawn of a new era. While CHW programmes have long been an underfunded afterthought, they are now front and centre as the emerging foundation of health systems. Despite this increased attention, CHW programmes continue to face the same pressing challenges: inadequate financing, lack of supplies and commodities, low compensation of CHWs, and inadequate supervision. We outline approaches for strengthening CHW programmes, arguing that their enormous potential will only be realized when investment and health system support matches rhetoric. Rigorous monitoring, evaluation, and implementation research are also needed to enable CHW programmes to continuously improve their quality and effectiveness. CONCLUSION: A marked increase in sustainable funding for CHW programmes is needed, and this will require increased domestic political support for prioritizing CHW programmes as economies grow and additional health-related funding becomes available. The paradigm shift called for here will be an important step in accelerating progress in achieving current global health goals and in reaching the goal of Health for All.

The Critical Role and Evaluation of Community Mobilizers in Polio Eradication in Remote Settings in Africa and Asia.

This article assesses the CORE Group Polio Project (CGPP) experience over a 20-year period in 5 countries. It examines how a program designed to provide social mobilization to eradicate one disease, and which did so effectively, functioned within the general framework of community health workers (CHWs). Vertical health programs often have limited impact on broader community health. CGPP has a 20-year history of social mobilization and effective program interventions. This history provided an opportunity to assess how CGPP community mobilizers (CMs) functioned in polio and maternal and child health. The Updated Program Functionality Matrix for Optimizing Community Health Programs tool of the CHW Assessment and Improvement Matrix (AIM) was used to examine CGPP CM roles across different contexts. The analysis determined that CGPP CMs met the basic level of functioning (level 3) for 6 of the 10 components of the AIM tool. This cross-country descriptive analysis of the CGPP demonstrates the importance of embracing the full range of CHW AIM components, even in a vertical program. Use of data, community involvement, local adaptation, and linkage with the health system are especially critical for success. This general lesson could be applied to other community mobilization and disease/epidemic control initiatives, especially as we face the issues of the COVID-19 pandemic.