Tracking investments to the frontlines of the health system in Africa
Community health workers (CHWs) are the backbone of primary health care (PHC) across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), particularly in rural and remote settings where they deliver essential services such as maternal and child health, immunisation, disease prevention, and health promotion. Yet despite their vital role, financing for community health across the region remains fragmented, opaque, and heavily reliant on external aid.
The financing Alliance for Health (FAH) is proud to launch CHIP: Community Health Investments for PHC, a new Africa-focused dashboard developed by Financing Alliance for Health (FAH).
What is CHIP?
The CHIP dashboard is a centralized, SSA-level country specific platform that brings together data on financing for community health including:
- Government and donor financing flows to community health
- Policy and system readiness (formalisation, compensation, integration)
- Service delivery and selected health outcomes
By integrating these dimensions, CHIP makes visible how financing patterns across Africa shape community health programme design, policy implementation, and service delivery at the frontline of PHC.
CHIP is designed to help governments, funders, and implementers:
- Track where community health investments are going across SSA and through which programmes
- Identify financing, policy, and implementation gaps at national and regional levels
- Understand the balance between domestic spending and external assistance for CHWs
- Support more strategic, sustainable investments in PHC at the community level
Why CHIP matters
Recent evidence from FAH highlights a stark pattern: community health financing in SSA is donor-dominant and heavily skewed toward vertical, single-disease programmes, while domestic government allocations – more limited – are relatively more horizontal and aligned with primary health care. Between 2016 and 2022, 82.3% of CHW financing in SSA came from external aid, with 76.4% of donor funding directed to vertical programmes, and an estimated annual financing gap of US$4–5 billion.
Data on CHW financing, programmes, and policies across SSA are often scattered across sources and difficult to interpret for decision-making. Without clear, comparable visibility across countries, governments and regional partners face challenges in planning, prioritising, and progressively increasing domestic investment in community health.
CHIP addresses this gap by bringing financing, workforce, and outcomes data together in one place – with a clear focus on what reaches the frontlines.
What you will find in the dashboard
- Flow of government health expenditure to primary health care and community health across SSA
- CHW spending trends over time (government vs external assistance)
- Top funders for CHW programmes by country
- Estimated CHW numbers and population coverage
- Community health policy indicators across SSA countries
- Links between community health investments, service delivery, and key health outcomes
Our goal
CHIP is not simply a data product. It is a decision-support tool designed to inform policy dialogue, strengthen accountability, and support country-led pathways toward sustainable financing for community health financing.
By centring community health workers as the delivery backbone of primary health care, CHIP complements broader regional efforts – including those led by Africa Frontline First (AFF) – by providing a financing-focused evidence base to support national and regional action.
We invite governments, partners, researchers, and advocates to explore the dashboard, use the data, and engage with us as we continue to refine and expand CHIP.
Data sources and transparency
CHIP brings together publicly available, country-level data to provide a consolidated view of community health financing and systems across Africa. Core data sources include:
- National community health and primary health care policy and budget documents
- External assistance data from the OECD Creditor Reporting System
- Government health expenditure data from the WHO Global Health Expenditure Database
- Complementary policy and programme data from our Africa Frontline First Maturity Assessments and the Community Health Impact Coalition policy dashboard
As with all cross-country analyses, data availability and quality vary by country and year. Some community health investments e.g., sub-national expenditures – may be under-represented or difficult to attribute precisely to CHW programmes.
CHIP is therefore a living platform. We welcome feedback from governments, partners, and researchers to flag missing or updated information and help strengthen the accuracy and usefulness of the dashboard over time.
