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

World Centric + Integrate Health

$98,851.00 from profits from fiscal year 2019

In Togo, 368 women die for every 100,000 live births and nearly 1 in 10 children will not live to see their 5th birthday. That’s 15x the rate for developed countries. The majority of these deaths are from diseases that are treatable at very low costs; like malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia. Unfortunately, Togo lacks the functioning healthcare system to deliver effective treatments to women and children. As a result, 70% of Togo’s population lives without access to adequate healthcare.

The mission of Integrate Health is to make quality primary healthcare accessible to all. IH works alongside governments and the local community to implement and study an integrated approach to strengthening primary healthcare delivery in order to achieve universal health coverage. By integrating professional Community Health Workers with improved care in public clinics, IH creates a patient-centered health system that is accountable to the community and dramatically reduces mortality in resource-limited settings. This system includes four key components:

• 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 in 2017 with profits from 2016.

The Impact

World Centric funding helps sustain Integrate Health's current services provided in 4 Kozah district sites, 4 Dankpen distric sites, and 5 Bassar district sites. It will also help replicate the model in the Kéran district in July of 2020. Through all their sites, Integrate Health intends to have the following impact:

• 108,956 consultations of children under-five
• 232,875 home visits
• 4,123 facility-based deliveries
• 51% facility-based delivery rate
• 2,750 new adopters of FP
• 14% contraceptive coverage rate
• 30% prenatal consultation rate
• 85% of childhood illness treated within 72 hours of symptom onset

Indirect impact:

• Health improvements from access to quality health care
• Increased access to education about the benefits of family planning
• Wages for Community Health Workers
• Wages for 8 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.