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.