Ethiopia Health Extension Program

An Ethiopian government program that recruits high school graduates from local communities and gives them one year of training to become Health Extension Workers, stationed at health posts serving their own communities, created in response to the country's severe shortage of physicians and its need for an alternative model of health care delivery in underserved rural areas. Health Extension Workers deliver services across four core areas: hygiene and environmental sanitation, family health services including maternal and child health, disease prevention and control, and health education and communication, functioning as the front line of Ethiopia's primary health care system at the community level. By building a large cadre of community-based health workers drawn from and stationed within the populations they serve, the program extended basic preventive and family health services to rural communities that had previously had little or no access to any formal health worker.