Ghana Community-based Health Planning and Services

Ghana's national model for community-based primary health care, which grew out of a field experiment called the Community Health and Family Planning Project launched by the Navrongo Health Research Centre in the Kassena-Nankana district in 1993. The Navrongo trial combined redeployed, community-resident nurses with volunteer mobilization built on existing traditional community structures to bring doorstep preventive care, family planning and immunization directly to households in a hard-to-reach rural area, and it demonstrated measurable improvements in child survival and fertility outcomes. After a successful 1998 replication in the Nkwanta district, the government declared what became known as Community-based Health Planning and Services a national policy in 1999, and CHPS zones spread to a majority of Ghana's districts by 2000 and remain the structural foundation of the country's primary health care system more than two decades later.