Living Goods

Living Goods aims to save lives at scale by supporting digitally empowered community health workers. We work with governments and partners to leverage smart mobile technology, rigorously strengthen performance, and relentlessly innovate to cost-effectively deliver high-quality, impactful health services.

Effective community health programs save lives. Living Goods leverages a powerful combination of catalytic technology, high-impact training, and quality treatments that empower government community health workers (CHWs) to deliver quality care to their neighbors’ doorsteps. These CHWs also earn meaningful compensation and enhance their stature in the process, reinforcing a virtuous cycle of trust. We are deeply focused on systemic change, and partner with governments and other partners to transform access to primary health care for mothers and children. We put patients first and strive to create a world in which every mother gives birth safely and no child dies from an easily treatable–or preventable–disease like malaria, pneumonia, or diarrhea. We believe universal health care is possible when community health workers (CHWs) are equipped to serve as the engine for stronger health systems.

Living Goods is a nonprofit, but we apply best practices borrowed from the private sector to drive measurable results and ensure cost-effective services. We’re nimble and quick-footed, and hold ourselves accountable to quantifiable and aggressive targets designed to drive health impact. We’re idealistic—but pragmatic—and we push ourselves to learn, adapt, and optimize our approaches in cases where we fail to meet targets or when local circumstances change.

We’re also fanatical about numbers. By maintaining our focus on measurable data, we’ve found technology and analytics are valuable allies in driving cost-effective, high-quality community health programs. We infuse data into our end-to-end operations, from real-time performance management to preventing stock-outs of essential medicines, monitoring disease outbreaks, ensuring equity in treatment, and closing gaps in patient referrals to full-service health facilities.

Why Community Health?
Community health workers can save millions of lives far faster and at a lower cost than facility-based care. Community health is fundamental to delivering universal health coverage.
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By 2026,  Living Goods will significantly improve health outcomes for at least 9.7 million people in three countries, and support governments to transition to substantial ownership of community health care delivery.
This strategy is ambitiously centered on supporting governments to truly own and invest in stronger national health systems. We are trying to tackle huge underlying issues and have set targets that we know will be difficult to achieve.

Overview of our Strategy
Living Goods’ new strategic plan focuses on the next frontier of impact: enabling government partners to improve health outcomes nationally, by ensuring CHWs can reach their full potential. Building on our unique experience supporting more than 12,000 CHWs to deliver quality health care to more than 9 million people, this plan focuses on ensuring high-quality, digitally enabled community health care can be professionalized and scaled more sustainably, in more countries— saving and improving more lives.

STRENGTHENING DELIVERY THROUGH LEARNING SITES

Living Goods will implement high-quality, cost-effective community health care using the DESC approach in learning sites. Living Goods will invest directly in these sites to ensure all elements of DESC are in place and will deliver high-quality care to approximately 2.5 million people over five years.

SUPPORTING SCALING FOR NATIONAL IMPACT

Living Goods will provide on-the-ground implementation support to governments that enables them to sustainability lead community health service delivery. Drawing on our implementation experience, Living Goods will help put operational best practices in place across all DESC elements by supporting supervisors, managers, and regional and national government teams to optimize performance and cost-effectively improve the care families receive—reaching an additional 7.2 million people over five years.

SHAPING THE COMMUNITY HEALTH ENABLING ENVIRONMENT

Living Goods will partner with governments and other leaders in the field to advance the community health movement and improve the enabling environment. We will engage in advocacy and policy support, and share collected data, evidence, and learnings to shape policies and implementation frameworks in the countries where we work and beyond.