Consultant – Community Health Worker Strategy

Requisition ID: req44844

Job Title: Consultant – Community Health Worker Strategy

Sector: Health

Employment Category: Consultant

Open to Expatriates: Yes

Location: Global Remote

Work Arrangement:

Background

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is one of the world’s leading humanitarian relief and development organizations. Founded in 1933 at the request of Albert Einstein, the IRC responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people survive, recover and regain control of their lives. Working in more than 40 countries, the IRC helps to restore hope and opportunity to millions of people. The IRC health unit (HU) is organized in three sectors: Health (primary healthcare, sexual and reproductive health, child health, chronic care, mental health & psycho-social support), Environmental Health and Nutrition.

Community Health Workers (CHWs) are core to the IRC Health Strategy and a vital pillar of the global public health system, that allows governments and NGOs to address the shortage of skilled health workers particularly in low-income contexts and remote settings with difficult access. With technical support and supervision from the skilled health workers, CHWs can be supported to provide basic health services in their communities. The specifics of CHW programs vary widely between and within cultural and political contexts and implementing organizations, and the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on accessing already hard to reach populations, and the increasing use of new technology in health information dissemination imply further needs for programming adaptations.

While the IRC has a robust history of supporting CHW programming in humanitarian contexts in displaced and host communities, there is significant room for greater scale and impact by investing more in standardizing our approach to CHW programming. Efforts are underway to adapt and improve CHW programs from task shifting (iCCM, NCD and MHPSS care in the community, community-based FP, community based maternal and newborn care), low-literacy job aids to the digitization of CHW training and supervision, data collection and reporting to the development of data models to predict optimal program design.

This consultancy will build on the preliminary work done to map out how different health sub-sectors (EH, SRH, nutrition, NCDs, MPHSS) support and implement activities through CHWs. There is need to better understand the typology of CHWs in all countries where IRC works vis a vis the internationally accepted definition of a CHW. Understanding the CHW typology, their current workload and tasks performed, will culminate into shared definition of what a CHW is for IRC health programs and a holistic vision that articulates IRC’s overarching CHW strategy. CHW core competencies, standards for selection, training, motivation and supervision, activity monitoring and strategies for community engagement will be developed particularly for countries where IRC has health programs with possibilities of piloting programming in humanitarian settings where systems are not in place and also fill in guidance gaps where systems are in place.

While keeping cognizant of existing MoH policies and UNHCR guidelines, the developed strategy will by no means seek to replace them, but rather link into them while providing an IRC CHW approach to the work in the country programs with significant policy and program implementation gaps. A multi-context guidance will be drafted to improve operationality of IRC’s CHW programming while working with the existing systems, adapting them to gain efficiency and better optimization of services especially along the emergency continuum.

A consultant will be engaged to draft the IRC multi-context CHW strategy that will support all CHW program activities across crisis phases - acute emergency, protracted humanitarian and host community settings where the health systems may not be functional or have critical gaps. The strategy will also take into consideration the wide spectrum of socioeconomic statuses of the countries in which IRC operates. It will provide clear definition and direction of CHW programs, detailing the key elements of recommended best practice and tools to ensure quality contextual CHW programming.

Scope of work

1. Review consultancy terms of reference and submit an action plan:

• Key dates for each deliverable. Include competencies and CVs of each team member, where applicable, and what they will contribute to this consultancy.

2. Map what CHWs are doing across IRC country programs and externally in other organizations:

• Review other organization guidance and existing strategies and evidence such as existing MoH policies, UNHCR guidelines for refugee health programming to understand how they support CHW programming.
• Undertake scoping of CHWs cadres currently working in IRC health programs. Review previous transcripts of Key Informant Interviews (KIIs) that were conducted with Country Programs and conduct additional KIIs with IRC Health Advisors and Technical Coordinators if required, and with staff from other organizations with CHW programs to identify useful external adaptable approaches, CHW terms of reference and resources for the IRC CHW Strategy.
• Conduct in-depth desk review of previous work done by IRC on developing a CHW strategy - key documents and deliverables and identify additional information needs for development of the CHW Strategy.

3. Development of IRC CHW quality standards:

• Draft multi-context guidance on how to make use of MoH policies and UNHCR guidelines to improve operationality, efficiency and optimization of CHW programming in contexts where MoH policies or UNHCR guidelines for refugee programming exist.
• Review both internal IRC branded and external CHW training curriculum, training materials job aids, supervision checklists, data collection tools and other innovative or behavioral science documentation strategies that are applicable to the multiple contexts used by IRC and other organizations based on existing evidence and effective strategies.
• Review evidence and outputs from activities generated internally by the research and innovation department, and external facing evidence, documentation and best practices related to CHWs programming and propose contextually relevant ones and incorporate them into this strategy.
• Assess the workload of the IRC-supported CHWs based on information obtained from KIIs conducted with key IRC staff and analyze it how it affects performance and propose key recommendations to address it.
• Recommend contextually relevant digital tools and interventions to support delivery of CHW activities such as iCCM, treatment of wasting, community-based maternal and newborn care (CBMNC), self-care, community-based chronic care.
• Review available digital tools being used by CHWs both internally and externally, ensuring differentiation of the right tools by contexts, high/low income, digital coverage/literacy, government policies/tools, and by type of CHW intervention. Explore possibilities of usage of emergent digital applications such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and provide guidance on how these applications could be leveraged.
• Propose a functional CHW program management structure that broadly encompasses the thematic areas of leadership, coordination, service delivery, supply chain management and human resources.

4. Development of a CHW strategy for IRC health programs:

• Draft the IRC CHW strategy that will include common definition of CHWs, a set of core competencies, strategies for CHW selection/motivation/retention, standards for training, maximum acceptable workload and actions to deal with situations of excess work, supervision, monitoring of activities, service package offered across multiple contexts in the health sub-sectors, selected guidance documents were applicable.

The consultant will work remotely and collaborate with a Steering Committee (SC) comprised of 5-6 IRC staff. The SC will review, discuss and approve each of the set deliverables. A meeting schedule of up to 8 - 10 meetings will be prescheduled for this purpose.

Deliverables

• Detailed consultancy action plan.
• Quality standards for IRC CHWs.
• Mapping of CHWs work, both internally and externally.
• CHW Strategy for IRC health programs.

All these documents should be organized in a shared drive for easy access.

IRC inputs

• Access to key IRC resource persons globally and at country level.
• Access to documents on preliminary work done on the CHW strategy.
• Agreed upon consultancy fee payment by deliverables.

Key Working Relationships:

Position Reports to: Health Technical Advisor for management of the consultancy and the Steering Committee for the technical aspects of the consultancy.

Qualifications

Job Qualifications:

Education: Master’s/post-graduate degree in public health, community health or other relevant field or equivalent combination of education and experience is required.

Work Experience:

• A minimum of 5 years of working in primary health care programs in Africa, Middle East or Asia.
• Field work experience implementing or providing technical assistance to Community Health Workers preferably in fragile and conflict affected states.

Demonstrated Skills and Competencies:

• Strong writing skills.
• Expertise in implementing use of digital tools and innovations for CHWs.
• Demonstrated expertise in the designing similar strategy documents.
• Critical thinking and strategy mindset.
• Team player with a track record of collaborating across multiple diverse teams.

Language Skills:

• Proficiency in either French, Spanish or Arabic desirable.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English required.

Location: Global – working remotely.

The consultancy is expected to be completed within 45 days over a period of 4 months.

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