Living Goods
Model & Strategy
Living Goods saves lives at scale by supporting digitally empowered community health workers who deliver care on call, making it easy for families in need to get care. They work with governments and partners to strengthen national community health systems, ensuring health workers are effectively equipped, compensated, and supervised. Living Goods has served nearly 6.2 million people.
The Problem
Access to essential health services in Sub-Saharan Africa is severely limited for more than half the population, leading to poor child and maternal health outcomes. In Kenya and Uganda, for example, one in 27 children will not reach their fifth birthday due to largely preventable and treatable causes; in Burkina Faso, it is one in 12. Barriers to quality care include shortages of skilled health workers, long distances to facilities, frequent stockouts of medicines, and poor health education and practices.
For many families in low- and middle-income countries, community health workers (CHWs) are their first and only link with the healthcare system. These frontline workers travel door-to-door with essential care to provide their neighbors with health education, prevention, and basic curative services. While CHWs can make a high impact at a low cost, limited political prioritization and insufficient funding have left many CHW programs fragmented, trapped in pilot and sub-scale phases, and ineffective – leaving CHWs without the tools and training they need to move the needle on health outcomes. Despite this, experts estimate that if done right, CHW networks could save millions of lives per year and generate an economic return of up to 10:1.
The Solution
In Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Uganda, Living Goods confronts the biggest impediments for CHWs: reliance on paper-based systems, difficulty accessing treatments, minimal training and supervision, and working without compensation. They have defined the four most important programmatic areas — validated by WHO guidelines and peer experiences — that cost-effectively drive performance management of CHW networks. These programmatic areas include: digitally empowering CHWs through tools to collect data and improve the quality of care; equipping CHWs with skills and essential medicines; providing them with field-based, data-driven supervision; and ensuring compensation for their work.
Above all, Living Goods believes that local ownership and government partnership are essential to sustaining lasting impact. Their work is thus centered on supporting governments to adopt high-impact elements of their approach until governments can fully own the system. Living Goods’ work has three core pillars: 1) Operating learning sites where they directly digitize, equip, supervise, and compensate CHWs; 2) Providing implementation support to governments to coach them on how to effectively deliver and finance their professionalized community health programs; and 3) Shaping the enabling environment by embedding their evidence-backed best practices in national policies, strategies, and budgets and by supporting governments on community health digitization. Through this work, Living Goods ensures millions of families can access quality health care where and when they need it while strengthening community health systems for enduring impact.
Chuck Slaughter founded Living Goods because over 20,000 kids are dying every day for want of simple health interventions that cost less than a cup of coffee.
Ten years ago, Chuck went to help a struggling medical charity in Kenya and saw health centers were chronically under-stocked and under-staffed, and drug shops where counterfeits were rampant.
In Africa, your child can die from a mosquito bite or a sip of dirty water if left untreated. If your daughter is sick you can spend hours getting her to a health center, and hours waiting to be seen, only to learn they are out of the life-saving drugs she needs. One out of two families lose a child before age 5, and nearly half of those die in the precious first days of life. When my kids are sick, I can call for help 24 hours a day. In Uganda you can zap money to anyone with a phone, so why can’t you use a phone to call for quick basic medical help when you need it?
Living Goods deploys 6,000 community health entrepreneurs in Uganda and Kenya armed with Android phones and our Smart Health app. Now, 5 million people can make a simple call to get high quality care delivered to their door – for less than the cost of transport to a health center. The app automatically diagnoses the three leading killers of young kids, and texts timed dosage reminders. It also delivers personalized advice for every pregnant mother and prompts our agents to follow up with newborns most at risk. Child deaths are dropping by over 25% where our health promoters work, at an annual cost per person reached of less than $2.
IMPACT
In 2013, a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Uganda showed that Living Goods-supported CHWs reduced under-five mortality by 27% and stunting by 7%, all for less than $2 per person annually. Preliminary results from a second RCT demonstrate a 30% reduction in under-five mortality and a 27% reduction in infant mortality.
As of 2023, Living Goods has supported over 11,000 CHWs serving nearly 6.2 million people with essential health services.
Through partnerships with governments and peer organizations, Living Goods has shown replicability and scalability, while positively influencing community health programs in three core countries (Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Uganda).
