Community Health Committees: A Catalyst for Global Health

World Vision
Sarah M Crass

Contributing Expert: Michele Gaudrault - World Vision Sustainable Health Learning and Development Advisor; World Vision International COMM Project Model Champion

What if the greatest and even smallest of health problems within the global sphere were improved by the actions of the community members living right in the middle of those problems? Such a system has been implemented by World Vision through its work in training and supporting Community Health Committees (COMM). This is a community group made up of volunteers; individuals who become apart of a community system that comes to understand what their community’s existing health problems are. As a result, COMM births a desire within the hearts of volunteers, and the community, to take the necessary steps that will lead towards overall improved health.

At the start of this program implementation, World Vision recognized that while these groups already exist on paper, they are, however, poorly trained and furthermore, don’t have the resources in place that will result in successful implemented action. Due to these findings, in 2014, a training manual was developed and field tested in Swaziland. After some trial and error, the training materials were taken under re-construction and the improved facilitator’s manual and training tools were put into effect in the Spring of 2016.

Working alongside Community Health Workers (CHW), COMM supports the CHW program and will continue to function as an additional tool for improved health in communities in both fragile and non-fragile contexts. While CHWs are community members who have been trained to deliver basic health services under the supervision of trained professionals, those working with COMM are individuals who seek to better understand the evolving health problems and then, use supervisor feedback as a tool for overall community improvement.

Michele Gaudrault, COMM Capacity Building Advisor, comments on the decision to align COMM’s support to CHWs with the USAID-developed CHW Assessment and Improvement Matrix (CHW-AIM) tool, “It’s great because it will merge nicely with what the ministries of health are already doing. This is seen as a key way of helping to work on community systems strengthening.”

The initial COMM training of trainers, which took place this last Spring, consisted of a six week e-learning course followed by an in-person event where participants from 10 countries in Africa were trained by champions of health with the developed materials. After assessment, these countries are now ready to move forward and train facilitators in their own communities with the same materials that they had been trained on. As these countries move forward, these training facilitations should begin to come underway in late 2016.

While progress has been made globally in increasing attention and funding for CHW’s, the same cannot be said for community health committees. World Vision is looking towards COMM as key element of a functioning health and community system that will only continue to fill in the gaps that have been long needed to fulfill. While these systems might be catalyzed by World Vision staff, the ultimate actions to improve global health will have taken origin in the community, the truest catalyst for change.