Emergent is proud to highlight nonprofit organizations, and the work that they do to advance public health. Today’s spotlight is on Last Mile Health, who have made it their mission to save lives in the world’s most remote communities. Emergent GIVES has supported Last Mile Health since 2022, learn more about our corporate giving program.
Closing the health care access gap for Liberia’s rural and remote communities
Following a two-decades long civil war, there were only about 50 doctors left in Liberia to serve a population of four million, and those doctors worked exclusively in the capital city of Monrovia. This meant that access to healthcare was out of reach for people living in rural and remote communities. More than 1.2 million people were living more than five kilometers from any health facility, representing an enormous gap in access to basic health care. Last Mile Health made it their mission to close this gap.
Last Mile Health was co-founded by American doctors and Liberian civil war survivors in 2007 in Liberia’s remote Konobo District. The foundation of Last Mile Health’s work is in paid, professionalized community health workers. This means training community members to provide an essential package of primary healthcare services at their neighbors’ doorsteps, as well as supporting those community health workers to deliver standardized, quality care.
When effectively supported, community health workers drive progress toward universal health coverage, deliver critical services such as prenatal visits and screenings for malnutrition, connect patients—who may otherwise go without—to higher levels of care when needed, and reduce illness and deaths from preventable and treatable diseases like malaria or diarrhea by administering tests and treatment. They also identify and respond to new health threats, such as outbreaks and pandemics.
Last Mile Health prioritizes remote communities more than five kilometers from the nearest health center. This may not sound too far for those who have grown up in places where mechanized transportation, personal or public, is accessible and ubiquitous. But in hard-to-reach regions, this distance is most commonly taken by foot on dirt roads or paths, often through dense forests or across desert areas under intense sun and wind. Obstacles such as flooded-out bridges make the journey significantly longer and more arduous, and the trip to a health facility can represent hours or even days of travel. It can also involve fees for boats across a river that may be unaffordable to those seeking care. The distance to the nearest health facility can be a life-or-death situation, and community members are forced to decide whether it’s worth going to the clinic at all.
That’s why equipping community health workers to serve the remote communities in which they live can make such a big difference.
In order to succeed, community health workers must be equipped with what Last Mile Health calls “the Six Ss”: they must be salaried, skilled, supplied, supervised, and integrated into data and financing systems operating at national scale. Last Mile Health works to ensure these needs are met, working with its government partners to strengthen health systems, train health workers, and deliver care to create resilient, effective national community health programs—programs which can serve as global exemplars.
Nearly 14,000 community and frontline health workers have been supported by Last Mile Health in partnership with ministries of health across four African countries, providing essential primary health care to upwards of 14.7 million people. Today, Last Mile Health partners with the governments of Ethiopia, Liberia, Malawi, and Sierra Leone. Each of these countries carries its own specific context, culture, history, and economic realities, and Last Mile Health’s focus is tailored to meet these unique needs, bolstering the evidence base for community-based primary care and providing additional examples for other governments and community health systems.
To translate government priorities and technical expertise into real programs and impact, robust funding is critical. In Africa alone, there’s a community health funding gap of $4.4B per year. Partners like Emergent, who is proud to have supported Last Mile Health since 2022, provide funds that allow programs to be implemented. This means tangible progress toward creating sustainable, scalable health care systems, preventing the next epidemic or pandemic, and ensuring everyone, everywhere can access quality primary care. Diseases are universal, but access to healthcare is not. Together, we can change this reality by bringing paid, professionalized community health workers within reach for the world’s most rural and remote communities.