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Council Collaborator Honored by
Ghana’s President
In February of 2007, President John Agyekum Kufuor of Ghana bestowed
the first President’s Excellence Awards for Public Services. The awards
are part of the African Union’s efforts to celebrate and encourage
reform, productivity, and innovation at government institutions
throughout Africa.
The Ghana Health Service won three of the four awards, two of them
for its Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) initiative,
to which the Population Council has provided guidance and technical
expertise since its inception in 1999. CHPS evolved from a pilot
project, the Navrongo experiment, which the Population Council launched
with the Ghana Health Service in northern Ghana in 1994. Among its many
achievements, CHPS has reduced the mortality rate among children younger
than five by two-thirds and has brought about a 15-percent decline in
fertility. It has done so by changing the focus of primary health care
and family planning services from in-clinic care to high-quality
services provided at community and “doorstep” locations. The initiative
is currently being scaled up across Ghana as the health-sector component
of the government’s national poverty-alleviation program.
CHPS was honored with a gold plaque as an “Innovative Partnership
between the Public Service and Civil Society” and a silver plaque for
“Innovative Service Delivery Improvement.” Representatives from Burkina
Faso, Ethiopia, and Sierra Leone have participated in study tours of
CHPS sites in recent months.
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