VillageReach

Since our founding in Mozambique and Seattle in 2000, VillageReach has been an advocate for ensuring that quality health care reaches all communities, working with partners in sub-Saharan Africa to solve health care delivery challenges at the last mile —the lowest level of the health system where health care is provided. Today, our work increases access to quality health care for more than 43 million people across sub-Saharan Africa by increasing access to medicines and vaccines, improving the capacity of the health workforce and enabling better decision-making for patients, health workers and policy-makers.

Building on the solutions we have developed, we will extend our approach beyond the health facility, working with our partners to reach deeper into the community and build responsive, people-centered health systems.
Our vision is a world where everyone has access to the quality health care needed to thrive. To reach this vision and truly improve and ensure equitable access for all communities, we need health systems that understand the unique desires, circumstances and behaviors of the people they serve.

Through radical collaboration with government, the private sector and partners, VillageReach co-creates solutions that are developed, implemented, and eventually transitioned into the public sector to achieve sustained impact at scale. Our solutions get health products to people when and where they are needed and build pathways to primary health care services, increasing access for the under-reached and ensuring that their needs drive how products and services are delivered.

VillageReach conducts formal evaluations of our innovations, usually with outside evaluators and academic partners, to assess and measure our innovations’ contributions towards increasing access to quality healthcare.

VillageReach is a recognized global leader in supply chain transformation and we bring to bear our extensive knowledge of supply chain challenges at the last mile to create systems level change. When we design solutions to health care challenges, we put government and their needs front and center, and we work to bolster - not replace - their existing systems. We then take up the seat next to the government, bringing our own 20 years of expertise in supply chain logistics, along with private sector partners who understand our challenges. Together, we design next generation supply chains and scalable solutions that can be transferred to the government for the long term. We have successfully transferred most aspects of our Mozambique immunization supply chain to the Ministry of Health, and other VillageReach programs, like our Health Center by Phone in Malawi, are now being owned and operated by the government.

VillageReach Areas of Expertise include:
Supply Chain and Logistics: Data-driven approaches for comprehensive supply chain improvement.
Health Workforce Development: We design practical approaches to address human resource gaps and strengthen health worker skills.

Digital Health Technology: We develop technologies that improve communications and access to health data.

Data Analytics: We help governments and partners make sense of complex health data to drive decision-making and continuous improvement.

Our 165 staff members worldwide offer up their expertise in public health, technology and business to create systemic change and deliver on our mission. VillageReach has offices in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi and Mozambique, and partners with other NGOs and local governments in other countries, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa.

VillageReach was founded in 2000 to make sure that vaccines reached every rural health center in northern Mozambique. Today, our solutions increase access to quality healthcare for 43 million people across 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In the last year, VillageReach worked to improve the availability of important medicines and supplies at over 2,000 health centers, and our innovations gave over 12,000 health workers access to the information they needed to make critical decisions.

Under VillageReach’s 2020-2023 Goals and Strategies, we have three organizational goals:

Accelerate the development of people-centered health systems to reach the most under-served, resulting in improved access to quality health care for an additional 15 million people in sub-Saharan Africa.

We will be a global leader in radical collaboration with governments and the private sector to sustain and scale equitable primary health care delivery solutions.

We will build a sustainable organization that can execute with quality to achieve our programmatic goals.

Though COVID-19 has changed the framework of global health, it has not changed our dedication to our goals and strategies. While we recognize there may be delays and recasting of priorities, particularly as COVID-19 vaccines become more available, our adjustments will be more in degree than in substance. Even during this challenging time, VillageReach has accelerated work that is both relevant to pressing needs and aligned with our organizational priorities. We are providing COVID-19 information to health workers; obtaining and distributing PPE for community health workers; supporting testing logistics; and making sure that people in low- and middle-income countries have the medicine, supplies and information they need to thrive. Our goal is for at least 75 percent of these solutions to live beyond the pandemic.