Primary Healthcare for Women & Children in Togo
Impact Projects

Primary Healthcare for Women & Children in Togo

World Centric + Integrate Health

$100,000 from profits from fiscal year 2021

This project supports these U.N. Sustainable Development goals

In Togo, 396 women die for every 100,000 live births, and one in 15 children will not live to see their fifth birthday. That’s 15 times the rate for developed countries. The majority of these deaths are from diseases that are entirely treatable at very low costs, like malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia. Unfortunately, Togo lacks the functioning healthcare system required to deliver effective treatments to women and children in need. Essential healthcare systems, including personnel, supplies, and training, are currently absent or insufficient throughout much of the country. As a result, nearly six million people (70% of Togo’s population) live without access to adequate healthcare.

Integrate Health’s mission is to make quality primary healthcare accessible to all. IH works alongside governments and local communities to implement and study an integrated approach to strengthening primary healthcare delivery to achieve universal health coverage. By combining professional Community Health Workers (CHWs) with improved care in public clinics, this approach creates a patient-centered health system that is accountable to the community and dramatically reduces mortality. This approach 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.

Over the last five years, Integrate Health has created long-lasting impacts for women and children by expanding to a new district each year. Integrate Health’s Primary Care Program expects to achieve the following during 2022:

  • 210,135 total population served across 6 districts
  • 200 CHWs supported
  • 25 health centers supported
  • 32% modern contraceptive prevalence rate (% of women effectively protected by a modern FP method, out of eligible women)
  • 50% prenatal consultation coverage (% of women who completed 4 prenatal consultations prior to delivery)
  • 85% facility-based delivery rate (% of women who deliver at a health facility out of recorded births)
  • 95% of childhood illness treated within 72 hours of symptom onset
  • 75% effective pediatric referrals (% of referrals by CHWs for children needing escalated care that follow up at the health center)

Our grant of $100,000 goes towards the essential medicine and equipment needed for this program’s quality primary care.


Healthcare & Climate Change

To counter climate change, IH actively works to promote health-related solutions including increasing access to and education about the benefits of family planning. Addressing population growth is one of the most important steps to addressing climate change. In addition to promoting family planning, IH has partnered with the Climate Accountability Initiative, an alliance of NGOs committed to measuring and reducing carbon footprints. This process includes working with the Initiative to measure IH’s current carbon footprint, establish emissions reduction targets, and commit to reducing and offsetting IH’s footprint.


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.


 

Written by

World Centric

 

Read time

5 minutes

 

Published on

Apr 17, 2022

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