Care Group Approach

The Care Group Approach is a community-based behavior change strategy that engages paid community health workers and volunteers to reduce deaths and malnutrition among children under five. Groups of about ten to fifteen volunteer health educators meet biweekly with a paid community health worker for training and supervision, and each volunteer then shares information with ten to fifteen households through peer-to-peer communication and visual aids. The approach was pioneered in 1995 by World Relief in Mozambique under Drs. Pieter Ernst and Muriel Elmer, and expanded significantly in 1997 when Food for the Hungry launched a project in Mozambique's Sofala Province with USAID funding, after which both organizations helped spread the methodology to countries including Cambodia, Malawi and Rwanda. Research on the approach documents an average 32 percent reduction in under-five mortality and substantial decreases in malnutrition rates at a cost of 3 to 8 dollars per beneficiary annually, and the model has since expanded beyond maternal and child health to address food insecurity, child protection, tuberculosis control, gender norms and parenting support.