A few years ago, we considered the global health sector’s million-dollar question: How can we reach more people, in the places where health care is needed most, with no extra budget?
Outreach — where teams travel into rural communities to deliver health care — is still unparalleled for this. When I travel with an outreach team and arrive at a community site, it’s not uncommon to find 100 women lining up. Some tell me they walked tens of kilometers to get there; some pass through game parks, risking their lives against lions — literally. In these moments, this is no longer just a job or ‘an accelerated service delivery model.’ Without us, I believe these women wouldn’t have a choice, wouldn’t have a chance.
About 257 million women around the world still don’t have access to safe contraception, which is inexcusable when it’s so cheap and life-changing. The organization I work for, MSI Reproductive Choices Zambia’s previous approach simply couldn’t go far enough to reach everybody. As of 2018, a single outreach team was serving around 900 clients each month but we all wanted to reach more. With limited resources, we knew we had to reassess and innovate.
About the author
Inonge Chinyama
Inonge Chinyama is the operations director at MSI Reproductive Choices Zambia. She works closely with Zambia’s Ministry of Health to remove barriers that women and girls face to accessing reproductive health care, and to influence policy change. She also supports donor relations contributing to funding opportunities for MSI’s Zambian program.
