Welcome to the third installment of the Innovations in Healthcare Global Health Innovation Grantees blog series. 

History of the Global Health Innovation Grants Program

Since 2016, The Pfizer Foundation’s Global Health Innovation Grants (GHIG) program has supported community-based initiatives that aim to improve quality of care and strengthen health systems in lower income countries.

Innovations in Healthcare supports GHIG grantees by facilitating connections in the ecosystem, hosting GHIG-specific workshops and peer convenings at the Annual Forum, and conducting regular program monitoring to provide portfolio and individual results to the Pfizer Foundation.

Now in its eighth year (GHIG8), 20 new recipients of the one-year grant program have each received $100,000 USD to drive innovative solutions that help address vaccine-preventable illness in their communities.

Introducing Five of the Twenty 2024-2025 Grantees

Living Goods

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 the care they require.

Through the GHIG8 program, Living Goods will deliver high-quality community healthcare in Kenya for infectious diseases and common childhood illnesses. They will achieve this by:

1. Strengthening community healthcare delivery; and,
2. Supporting government-led community healthcare systems to improve care at scale.

Living Goods’ DESC model ensures that community health workers are professionalized and well-supported to provide life-saving care to their communities. Every community health worker that Living Goods supports is:

• Digitized
• Equipped
• Supervised
• Compensated

mothers2mothers (m2m)

mothers2mothers (m2m) provides health care to families who need it most, delivered by women who know them best. Through its Mentor Mother Model, m2m employs local women living with HIV as community health workers to meet the growing and urgent health needs of the communities they serve. These “Mentor Mothers” deliver integrated primary health care services to dramatically improve the health and well-being of women; children, adolescent girls and young women (ages 0-24); and special populations.

Via GHIG8, m2m will contribute to universal health coverage by reducing adolescent and infant morbidity and mortality rates by providing quality immunization services to children under five and adolescents, pregnant and breastfeeding women and their partners in Lilongwe District, Malawi. m2m will achieve this by:

• Supporting national immunization campaigns;
• Using its Peer Mentor Model to create demand for immunization through health staff outreach in one-on-one interactions, playgroup sessions, growth monitoring sessions, as well as in-school and home visits; and,
• Linking clients to service providers and following up with all clients who are due for their next immunization.

Muso

To end the child and maternal mortality crises and deliver universal health coverage at scale, Muso collaborates with policymakers and implementers to design, test, and scale evidence-based health systems that deliver care with speed to all patients who need it, when they need it.

Through the GHIG8 program, Muso will:

1. Provide essential, rapid health services to 160,000 patients across eight rural sites in the Bankass district, Mali;
2. Ensure 225 Community Health Workers (CHWs) will be regularly trained, supervised and supported with the tools they need in order to deliver quality door-to-door care; and
3. Support CHWs to enable patients to access essential, quality health services without fees at renovated and transformed partner government clinics, advancing their integrated model for child and maternal survival in a conflict setting.

North Star Alliance

As more and more people cross borders for work, recreation, and safety, the risk of disease spreading from country to country, and within countries, grows. That is why North Star Alliance is on a mission to provide quality healthcare to mobile workers and the communities with whom they interact. They accomplish this by remodeling shipping containers (painted blue) into roadside health centers for individuals with increased health risks.

Through the GHIG8 program, North Star Alliance will use a health system approach to enhance diagnosis, prevention, treatment, and management of infectious diseases such as Hepatitis B , HIV, other sexually transmitted infections, tuberculosis, COVID-19, yellow fever, respiratory tract infections and other infections affecting their target populations.

North Star Alliance will work with 50 CHWs and Ministry of Health workers to reach 20,000 people, including:

• 3,000 female sex workers;
• 5,000 truck drivers; and,
• 12,000 community members.

Pat Patronato Pro Zona Mazahua A.C.