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Community Health Workers: Meeting the Unmet Need for Family Planning in West and Central Africa

Sara Pacqué-MargolisA recent New York Times article featured an updated United Nations forecast that projects the world’s population will reach 10.1 billion by the end of the century, rather than stabilizing at nine billion midcentury as previously predicted. In part, these high rates of population growth are fueled by lower than expected declines in fertility in some of the poorer regions of the world—with the slowest fertility declines observed in West and Central Africa.

Behind the data
Demographers and other global health professionals argue that these sustained high rates of fertility and population growth are the result of a weakened commitment to family planning (FP) programs in the last two decades following a significant focus on FP during the 1970s and 1980s. Read more »

Stepping into the Spotlight: Reflections on Community Health Workers

Crystal NgThe focus of community health worker (CHW) discourse seems to have changed, and in my opinion, for the better. Whereas it previously seemed to me that global health conferences and literature focused primarily on training and task-shifting for CHWs, a recent meeting sponsored by the CORE Group—the implementing organization for the USAID Child Survival and Health Network Program—demonstrated that the field is now taking a more comprehensive view, including CHWs as a natural and key part of child survival and maternal and child health discussions.

Applying human resources management to community health workers

Throughout the sessions, the need to consider strategies for managing the development and performance of CHWs as part of a community health system came up repeatedly. Read more »

Only Human: The Challenge of Intentional Knowledge Management

Corinne FarrellThe last week was a bit of a whirlwind, as I spent Thursday and Friday in Washington, DC at the KM Impact Challenge unConference. There, I shared CapacityPlus’s experiences measuring the success of the HRH Global Resource Center.

I left the conference holding a stack of new contacts’ business cards and brainstorming uses for network analyses. I said to myself, on Monday I’ll tell my colleagues all about the unConference. Then my return flight was delayed. I got home late, rose early, spent hours at the emergency room with my three-year-old getting stitches, cleaned my house, came to work on Monday, filled out an expense report, wrote a trip report, sorted through 400 unread e-mails, and my “to do” list exploded. Read more »

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