Community Health Care for Women & Children in Togo, West Africa

World Centric + Integrate Health

$75,383.00 from profits from fiscal year 2018

70% of Togo’s population, more than five million people, live without access to adequate healthcare. The country lacks the system required to deliver effective treatments to women and children in need. Most healthcare is costly, poor quality, and not easily accessible. Integrate Health works to transform the poorest performing clinics in to centers of excellence by creating infrastructure improvements, providing clinical mentoring, equipping proactive Community Health Workers, and eliminating user fees.

Integrate Health has developed a replicable primary healthcare delivery system that includes four components. This comprehensive system has been designed and tested for effectiveness. Each component operates to remove a barrier to lifesaving care.

• Clinical Capacity-Building. Ensuring high-quality care by providing ongoing training and continuing medical education to nurses and midwives.
• Community Health Workers. Community Health Workers (CHWs) are frontline healthcare providers, predominantly women, recruited from the community they serve. They are trained, equipped, supervised, salaried, and fiercely passionate, combining a lifetime of local knowledge with an ongoing medical education.
• Supply Chain and Infrastructure. Integrate Health’s approach to improving supply chain management and basic infrastructure ensures that providers have high-quality facilities to work in and the tools they need to adequately care for their patients. Clinical mentors coach pharmacy managers to ensure proper supply, equipment, reporting, and ordering so that the right medication is in the right place at the right time.
• User Fee Removal. Research shows that even very small fees sharply limit access to healthcare. The pay-for-service nature of Togo’s healthcare system creates a vicious cycle where low utilization rates leave the health center with little investments while the community receives little care. By removing financial barriers, specifically costs at the point of care, use of lifesaving healthcare services increases dramatically. Clinics see more patients, and patients get the care they need.

This is the continuation of a project we first began funding with 2016 profits.

The Impact

World Centric funding helps sustain Integrate Health's current services provided in 4 Kozah district sites and 5 Bassar district sites. It will also help replicate the model in 4 new sites in the remote Dankpen District. Through all 13 sites, Integrate Health intends to have the following impact:

• Serve a population of 142,472 people
• Perform 79,978 sick child consultations
• Perform 20,497 pre- and post-natal consultations
• Perform 2,862 facility-based deliveries
• Reach 2,050 new adopters of family planning methods
• Ensure that 85% of children under-5 are treated within 72 hours of symptom onset
• Ensure 13% family planning coverage rate.

Indirect impact:

• Health improvements from access to quality health care
• Wages for 94 Community Health Workers
• Wages for 6 nurses
• 50% reduction in child mortality at the sites

About Integrate Health (Santé Intégrée)

A World Centric partner since 2017.

Integrate Health (Santé Intégrée) provides HIV care and treatment services in northern Togo, West Africa, where these services were previously not available. The organization is one of the most effective healthcare delivery services operating in the country. They focus on involving community members in the dynamics of the organization, ensuring that the programs are responding directly to patient priorities.

Integrate Health was founded in 2004 in an effort to support individuals living with HIV who were fighting for their right to healthcare. This work contributed to the creation of the most effective HIV care programs in Togo. This effort led to their current work to integrate health into every community and clinic.