Health and Child Care Minister Douglas Mombeshora said that the government plans to nearly double its current contingent of community-based health workers (CHWs), expanding from 19,000 to approximately 40,000 by 2030, and to fully integrate them into the formal health system.
This initiative aligns with the Africa CDC’s recent call for African countries to significantly scale up CHW recruitment to meet a continental target of two million by 2030, a commitment previously made by African Union member states.
With approximately one million CHWs currently deployed across the continent, an additional million are urgently required, particularly in communities experiencing low access to essential health services. Said Mombeshora:
If we look at the village health workers, we have targeted that we must have one in every village. We have about 35,000 villages in Zimbabwe. Currently, we have about 19,000 village health workers, and it means we have to double that figure by 2030.
These cadres are voluntary workers. We must have them in the community. They are supported with materials and training to be able to perform their duties. They are also given uniforms and bicycles to make them mobile in the community.
However, he expressed concern regarding the country’s reliance on external donor funding to remunerate village health workers, the majority of whom are not formally employed by the government. Said Mombeshora:
The challenge that we have seen so far is that almost all of the community health workers in our care centres in Zimbabwe are being paid by one of our partners.
Quite a lot of money was coming through the US, but when it was announced there was going to be a work-stop order, most of them stopped going to work.
This shows us we must absorb those village health workers into our Ministry of Health as permanent employees and give them decent remuneration.
We had made a suggestion that if we take them on board, then we should look at remunerating them between US$50 and US$80 a month.
Unfortunately, the US work stop order came as a surprise before we had even said how many we were going to take on board in a year, because we wanted to do this in a phased approach until 2030.
Currently, we’ve got that challenge, and we are in discussion with the Ministry of Finance to see what steps we can do to cover that gap.
More: The Herald
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