By Kizito Makoye DAR ES SALAAM (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – One of the biggest tests of Justine Michael’s job as a community health worker is not the distances he must travel along remote dirt roads to visit patients in Tanzania’s Mkuranga district, but rather the suspicion he often encounters. Michael is one of more than 5,000 community health workers the Tanzanian government has deployed to provide essential life-saving services in rural areas where 70 percent of the country’s population of 49 million live. The initiative was introduced a year ago to address gaps in healthcare in the East African country where there are only 0.1 doctors and 2.4 nurses and midwives for every 10,000 people, according to 2014 data from the World Health Organization.
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Tanzania’s army of community health workers face mistrust as they roll out services
