Health for the People: Past, Current, and Future Contributions of National Community Health Worker Programs to Achieving Global Health Goals

Key Messages After almost a century of experience, innovation, adaptation, and evidence, national community health worker (CHW) programs are now recognized as one of the most valuable assets for reaching global health goals, including achieving universal health coverage and ending preventable child and maternal deaths by 2030. In 2019, the United Nations General Assembly called urgently to accelerate progress in achieving these global health goals recognizing that, at the current pace, these goals will not be achieved for up to one-third of the world9s population. There is rapidly growing interest not only in CHWs but in community health more broadly, in engagement with communities for improving their own health, and in community-based surveillance for infectious disease outbreaks, especially now that the world is struggling to combat COVID-19 and is likely to face similar pandemics in the future. Training more professionalized CHWs with better and longer training, better supervision, improved logistical support, and well-defined career paths, and linking them to lower-level volunteer workers, each serving a small number of households, will help strengthen program effectiveness and improve CHW morale and long-term retention.