• Transforming Ideas Into Action
• Combating Climate Change
• Treating HIV/AIDS & Malaria
  • Why HIV/AIDS?
  • Our Approach
  • What We've Accomplished
  • Information Center Resources
• Fighting Childhood Obesity
• Promoting Economic Opportunity
• Creating Sustainable Development in Africa
• Enabling Sustainable Development

Rural Programs

Today more than 95% of people living with HIV are in the developing world, where a majority of the people live in rural settings with limited access to even the most basic health care, including HIV/AIDS treatment. CHAI has launched eight country-specific programs to address the scarcity of health services - particularly HIV/AIDS services - for rural communities in the countries where we work.

Scaling Up Rural Health Care in Rwanda

In January 2005, the Government of Rwanda (GOR) invited CHAI and Partners In Health (PIH) to aid in the development of a sustainable rural health care model in Rwanda to provide broad based health care specific to the needs of rural Rwandans while refining a process to scale up rural health throughout Rwanda and other African countries. For the pilot phase, the Government chose six sites in the rural southeast of the country, one of the poorest corners of Rwanda, to initiate the rural effort. By mid 2006, it was evident that a rapid implementation of the model had already achieved high quality outcomes and as a result the Government agreed to scale up the model nation-wide.

CHAI, PIH, and the GOR worked together to build a plan for a national scale up by decentralizing care, expanding the pilot model to all 30 rural districts in Rwanda by 2012. One way this is accomplished is by training large numbers of Community Health Care Workers (CHWs) to reach out to those in the community that can not reach a health care facility, and provide assistance for prevention, treatment and care of HIV/AIDS.

The long-term goal is to create a sustainable health care system that the GOR can fully finance. CHAI and the GOR have devised a plan that would gradually transfer financial ownership from external to internal sources over the next twelve years.