Empowering lay community-based health workers : improving primary health care service delivery in Delta State : how? and what works?

This policy brief outlines some actions to be taken to train and integrate lay community-based health workers (CHW) into the primary health care system of Delta State (Nigeria) to enhance the health workforce. In some communities CHWs provide health education messages and gather data; in others, they provide higher level services, such as dispensing medications and assisting at births. Roles, trainings, credentials, and services vary by community. An essential step in the Harmonization Framework is to adopt a common definition and core set of agreed-upon CHW tasks and competencies for different cadres of CHWs in the country