Community health workers as rights defenders: the Mitanin experience in India

Women community health workers from a government-run program in India have been unusually successful in combining rights-based advocacy with work on healthcare tasks paid for by the state. Over two decades, 70,000 indigenous and lower caste women “Mitanins” (community health workers) have advanced both the health and gender rights of members of the communities they are part of, and their own labor rights. Being able to strategically advocate for both types of rights is an experience unmatched by their counterparts in other parts of the world. This Development in Practice Note focuses on two elements of this experience: the movement-building approach of a government-run program to empower frontline community health workers, and the role of a hybrid agency in prioritizing social mobilization by these workers to improve healthcare delivery.