TARGET e.V. Ruediger Nehberg 1479 views

In 2003, Liberia emerged from more than a decade of civil war. After years of violence, the country’s health infrastructure was devastated. Only 50 doctors remained to treat a population of more than four million people. If you got sick in the city, you stood a chance. But if you got sick in a remote community – many of which are hours or even days away from the nearest clinic – you could die anonymously of a treatable condition like malaria, a complicated childbirth, or untreated infection.In 2007, a group of Liberian civil war survivors and American health workers came together to address these challenges. Raj Panjabi, Alphonso Mouwon, Weafus Quitoe, Marcus Kudee, Theo Neewrayson, and Amisha Raja co-founded an organization committed to seeking truth and justice for Liberia’s rural poor. They called themselves Tiyatien Health, meaning ‘justice in health’ in a local language. Joined by Peter Luckow in 2009, Tiyatien Health began Liberia’s first rural, public HIV program, which treating patients in a gutted closet in a war-torn building in Zwedru, Liberia with only $6,000 in seed money.Almost immediately, our growing team realized that the greatest needs were at Liberia’s last mile, where people in remote communities lacked access to healthcare due to distance and poverty. Their solution was to recruit, train, equip, manage, and pay community members to provide lifesaving health services to their neighbors. In so doing, they were also able to create a strong link between remote communities and the government’s public sector health system.With a refined focus and an ambitious vision for the future, Tiyatien Health came to be known as Last Mile Health in 2013. Since those early days, we have grown from a small team working out of a supply closet to a growing organization that serves as a dedicated partner to the Liberia Ministry of Health. And our journey has brought us through challenges we never could have predicted.