We match community innovation with university-backed research and evaluation to drive significant improvements in health. Lwala is a community-led innovator and non-profit operating in rural Kenya. We were founded by a group of community members facing the dual crisis of HIV and maternal mortality, who organized to build their region’s first health clinic and then engaged the research prowess of Vanderbilt University to rigorously measure its interventions. Today, Lwala is much more than a hospital; it is a community-led health model making dramatic improvements in maternal and child health, including a 64% reduction in child mortality, a 98% facility delivery rate, and a 300% increase in contraceptive uptake. The success of Lwala’s community-led health model has driven us to reject the notion that grassroots health initiatives are not scalable. Indeed, these local interventions can transform systems of inequity by leveraging the latent capacity of vulnerable communities.
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