USAID

ADDIS ABABA – The American people, through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), have supported child health services and strengthened the health care system through the Essential Services for Health in Ethiopia (ESHE) project. Over the past five years, the project has improved the lives of over 15 million Ethiopians through health initiatives at the community and national levels.

ESHE is coming to a close, the project shared lessons learned and highlighted the challenges and successes of project interventions at a meeting held September 17 at the Global Hotel. Participants included senior representatives from USAID, the Ministry of Health, Regional Health Bureaus, Woreda Health Offices, and local non government and community based organizations.

Since November 2003, ESHE has helped improve child health services for communities in 101 woredas in the three most populated regions of Ethiopia: Amhara, Oromia, and Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples. The child health interventions of the project focused on improving immunization services, on promoting essential nutrition actions and on strengthening integrated approaches toward care of newborn and childhood illnesses.

For this, ESHE provided capacity building support to health workers and managers in the woredas, zones and regions, strengthened supervision and monitoring capabilities of those managers, helped intensify large scale community mobilization, and implemented strong behavior change communication aimed at improving community and household health practices. Since the project worked in very close collaboration with the Ethiopian Government’s Health Extension Program, its contribution to the mobilization of more than 50,000 voluntary community health workers in support of the prevention and promotion activities of the health extension workers was key to the overall success of the project.

In addition, ESHE celebrated with its Ministry of Health counterparts the progress that health care financing reform has achieved in Ethiopia. ESHE’s support to the establishment of a legal framework for health facilities to retain and utilize fees was instrumental in laying the foundation for regional level implementation of different components of health care financing. The surveys disseminated during the meeting showed how health facilities start devoting resources to improving their infrastructure, their information systems, their human resource capacity and their supplies in drugs and medicine.

During the meeting it was also announced that the achievements of this projects would be build upon by two newly awarded projects.