“The moment before us is too important for us not to act now.” Former Liberian president, Her Excellency Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, opened the 3rd International Community Health Worker (CHW) Symposium 2023 with a clarion call to recognize the current and potential contributions of CHWs to improving health care delivery to reach everyone.
It was a call that resonated across the room and was felt deeply by over 1000 delegates from 49 countries, including top-level government officials, delivery organizations, and, of course, CHWs themselves who gathered in Monrovia, Liberia, from around the world to share knowledge and best practices on how to scale and sustain community health programs.
The theme of the late March symposium was “Advancing Community Health Worker programs to build resilient and equitable health systems that accelerate Primary Health Care for Universal Health Coverage.”
No conversations about CHWs, without CHWs
The symposium featured invigorating keynote addresses from Liberian President Dr. George Weah and Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, as well as panel discussions on the role of CHWs in the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of technology to support community health programs, and the importance of gender equality in community health.
But what marked this symposium as a special “moment,” as Her Excellency Ellen Johnson Sirleaf remarked, was the elevation of the voices of CHWs as never before, setting the stage for future conversations by embodying the principle “nothing about CHWs, without CHWs.”
Community Health Impact Coalition members deserve a special mention for their tireless energy and united effort to get health workers to this conference and onto the stage on nearly every panel, providing CHWs the space to advocate for themselves.
VillageReach sent eight delegates to the conference to showcase our leadership in supply chain optimization and product availability for CHWs, share the efficacy of our work leveraging CHWs to increase immunization demand, build momentum around our research and advocacy for empowering CHWs as vaccinators, and to learn from and connect with others.
