(May 25, 2012, USAID)--Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous nation, is also
overwhelmingly rural. Bucking the global trend of mass migration to
cities, over 80 percent of Ethiopians still live in hard-to-reach areas.
This isolation presents a formidable challenge for the government’s health sector, which, to complicate matters further, suffers from a severe shortage of doctors and health professionals. In a country of over 80 million, there are only 2,152 physicians—one for every 36,000 people.
Around a decade ago, the infant mortality rate in Ethiopia was nearly 10 percent, and the rate of those dying before their fifth birthday topped 16 percent, both statistics among the world’s highest. At a time when world leaders were gathering to set ambitious targets to raise the bar on global health with the Millennium Development Goals, Ethiopia’s numbers demanded attention.
And while progress in child health has been made—over the past five years, the under-5 mortality rate has decreased by 28 percent, from 123 to 88 deaths per 1,000 live births—the Ethiopian Government still considers the death rate intolerably high as one in 11 children today still do not live beyond their fifth birthday.
Finding answers to several questions was considered central to making greater gains: How do you bring quality health services to rural villages? How do you empower families to take charge of their own health? How do you encourage pregnant women to seek preventive care and dissuade them from potentially dangerous home deliveries?
After babies are born, how do you ensure they are fed properly, and are vaccinated to survive those tenuous first months and years of life? How do you give mothers the information they need to improve their family’s health, including the benefits of birth spacing? When government-sponsored care is available, how do you encourage deeply traditionally people to use it?
While these basic questions barely warrant a second look within developed health systems, to the Ethiopian Health Ministry, they often represent a matter of life and death.
Women at the Center
The government’s response, according to Ethiopian Health Minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has been to methodically construct a “women-centered” health system “by linking leaders at the national, regional and district levels with women’s groups in every village across the country.”
The plan was officially rolled out in 2003 in the form of the landmark Health Extension Program (HEP). The government would first train a fleet of young women for a year to provide basic, largely preventive, primary health services to rural villages, and then deploy them in pairs around the country to alert communities to unhealthy practices and empower families to take charge of their own health. The program was designed to tackle both the rural access problem and the health-sector workforce gap. Read more from USAID Front Line »
This isolation presents a formidable challenge for the government’s health sector, which, to complicate matters further, suffers from a severe shortage of doctors and health professionals. In a country of over 80 million, there are only 2,152 physicians—one for every 36,000 people.
Around a decade ago, the infant mortality rate in Ethiopia was nearly 10 percent, and the rate of those dying before their fifth birthday topped 16 percent, both statistics among the world’s highest. At a time when world leaders were gathering to set ambitious targets to raise the bar on global health with the Millennium Development Goals, Ethiopia’s numbers demanded attention.
And while progress in child health has been made—over the past five years, the under-5 mortality rate has decreased by 28 percent, from 123 to 88 deaths per 1,000 live births—the Ethiopian Government still considers the death rate intolerably high as one in 11 children today still do not live beyond their fifth birthday.
Finding answers to several questions was considered central to making greater gains: How do you bring quality health services to rural villages? How do you empower families to take charge of their own health? How do you encourage pregnant women to seek preventive care and dissuade them from potentially dangerous home deliveries?
After babies are born, how do you ensure they are fed properly, and are vaccinated to survive those tenuous first months and years of life? How do you give mothers the information they need to improve their family’s health, including the benefits of birth spacing? When government-sponsored care is available, how do you encourage deeply traditionally people to use it?
While these basic questions barely warrant a second look within developed health systems, to the Ethiopian Health Ministry, they often represent a matter of life and death.
Women at the Center
The government’s response, according to Ethiopian Health Minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has been to methodically construct a “women-centered” health system “by linking leaders at the national, regional and district levels with women’s groups in every village across the country.”
The plan was officially rolled out in 2003 in the form of the landmark Health Extension Program (HEP). The government would first train a fleet of young women for a year to provide basic, largely preventive, primary health services to rural villages, and then deploy them in pairs around the country to alert communities to unhealthy practices and empower families to take charge of their own health. The program was designed to tackle both the rural access problem and the health-sector workforce gap. Read more from USAID Front Line »
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