Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

The Ghana Community-Based Health Planning And Services Initiative: Fostering Evidence-Based Organizational Change And Development In A Resource-Constrained Setting, Frank K. Nyonator, John Koku Awoonor-Williams, James F. Phillips, Tanya C. Jones, Robert A. Miller

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

Research projects demonstrating ways to improve health services often fail to have an impact on what national health programs actually do. An approach to evidence-based policy development has been launched in Ghana that bridges the gap between research and program implementation. The Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) initiative employs strategies tested in the successful Navrongo experiment to guide national health reforms that mobilize volunteers, resources, and cultural institutions to support community-based primary health care. Over the 1999 to 2002 period, 100 out of the 110 districts in Ghana adopted a CHPS initiative. This paper reviews features of the initiative …