Hope Through Health

Hope Through Health (HTH) works to expand access to health care through community-driven initiatives in partnership with the public sector in Togo, West Africa. Togo ranks 139 of 169 on the Human Development Index, with 62% of its population living in poverty. With only 4 physicians and 19 nurses per 100,000 people, deteriorating buildings and poor quality services, the public health system lacks the resources to respond to patient needs. HTH believes that communities can transform the dynamics of health care delivery. We train and support patients and community members to fill key service delivery roles as community health workers, psychosocial counselors, program coordinators, custodial and clinic support staff, and rights advocates. Their involvement ensures that our programs respond directly to patient priorities. By empowering community members, we see a range of practical benefits including decreased stigma, increased capacity and skills of local community members, greater patient engagement, increased information sharing, and higher staff motivation. Simply put, active community engagement leads to the delivery of better, more responsive health care services with increased capacity of the community to hold the heath care system accountable for the quality and effectiveness of care delivered. Since 2004, HTH has been committed to a long-term partnership with AED-Lidaw to provide comprehensive HIV prevention and treatment services throughout the northern Kara Region of Togo. To date, HTH has trained over 95 local staff members, more than 50% of whom are living with HIV/AIDS, to carry out comprehensive HIV prevention and treatment programs through five health center sites in partnership with the public sector. These programs include HIV prevention and education, voluntary counseling and testing, medical and psychosocial consultations, provision of medications to treat HIV and associated opportunistic infections, home visits by trained community health workers, prevention of mother-to-child-transmission and programs to treat pediatric HIV/AIDS. The expansion of services beyond the traditional health care facility ensure that even the most vulnerable are linked and retained in a continuum of care in which the socioeconomic barriers to access to life saving treatment are addressed.