Speaker 1: In Africa, there are millions of people who live out of the reach of health care. One out of five children will not reach the age of five. They will die from malaria, pneumonia, conditions we know how to treat. It does not have to be that way.

Speaker 2: The traditional model for health care is people go to the facility to seek help. With the community health model, we take the services to the people.

Speaker 3: The community health worker is a trusted neighbor.

Speaker 4: They go door to door and provide services that prevent illness.

Speaker 5: It is cheap, and yet the impact is immense.

Speaker 6: Right now, governments are rewriting their plans for their health care systems. The question is, will we do it right?

Speaker 1: What it will take is investing in the last mile, ensuring that every child and family has a community health worker in their neighborhood or in their village.

Speaker 6: Are we going to do what's needed to support these community health workers? Will we be as brave as they are every day in how we design the systems to support them?

Speaker 7: Roslyn. Hi. How have you been? I'm okay. Alright. You're ready to go to the field? Yeah. Any pregnant women? Yeah, they are. Alright. Roslyn. Margreti. How are you? I'm good. Okay.

Speaker 8: My name is Roslyn. I'm a mother of three, and I'm a community health worker. You deal with each person the way he or she comes. They know if I become sick, Roslyn is there for me.

Speaker 6: There are millions of people who are looking for meaningful work, and they're ready to care for and look after their neighbors. We just need to shift our thinking about who we're supporting as health workers.

Speaker 1: Investing in community health workers means ensuring that they have the right training.

Speaker 8: I go to the training maybe once every month. We keep on motivating one another.

Speaker 6: Imagine being asked to look after 500 people. You'd probably try to organize who needs what care and what services. What we try to do is make that all really easy with technology.

Speaker 8: The advantage of the phone is to make sure you don't make errors, so it guides us. They have an application that has profiles for every person,

Speaker 6: and they're connected to a clinic with staff that can support them. We're co-designing this technology with community health workers

Speaker 3: so that community health can be delivered in a completely different level than before. This is a way of giving an individual a livelihood,

Speaker 4: and what we have found is that community health workers have a high return on investment. They've increased access to treatment for malaria, pneumonia, and diarrhea.

Speaker 1: There's an increase in the number of children being immunized.

Speaker 2: We're also providing nutrition services as well. As a result, more and more children are living and thriving.

Speaker 5: We don't want to lose children.

Speaker 8: Now I'm trained, and I count myself as somebody who can help. Every child deserves a fifth birthday, and community health can make that possible.

Speaker 5: The proverb says that if you want to walk fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together. It's about movement building. Philanthropy, the government, the public sector, and the private sector,

Speaker 4: everyone has a role to play in taking community health systems to scale. As leaders and as government, we must work together

Speaker 2: to reach every community. Our challenge is to take results that are at the scale of 10 million people

Speaker 6: and deliver that for a billion people. If I go back to the United States, and I consider what sort of health care system will reach everyone, it's a system that looks a lot like what we're doing in Kenya, in Mali, in Uganda. If every country in the world invested in the health care system,

Speaker 1: if every country in the world invested in their own community health workforces, we could save 2.5 million lives annually.

Speaker 8: I'm proud to be a community health worker. If we continue like this, I think our communities are going to improve more and more.

Speaker 5: There is no other way of thinking about health, other than to see health as a human right. That is the premise on which we serve the underserved.

Speaker 1: I think the question we have to ask ourselves as a human race is as there's more and more inequality in the world, are we ready to set up a health care system that can provide just, equal, and dignified care to every last one of us?

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