Our last blog covered Ethiopia's health extension workers-- a massive scale-up on non-clinicians who have helped the child mortality rate to plummet over the last decade. Dr. Tedros Adhanom, the former Minister of Health, stated in an address at Georgetown University, "Our community-based Health Extension Program actually exceeded its target by training and deploying over 38, 000 health extension workers countrywide." How exactly did they do it in just three years?

In Ethiopia’s battle on maternal and newborn health, women increasingly comprise the front lines, the infantry, and the battlefield itself. Over the past decade, an all-female “army” of Health Extension Workers has been deployed, in pairs and by the thousands, deep into the rural villages of Africa’s second most populous nation.