In Burundi, the DRC and Uganda, access to doctors is extremely limited and nurses deliver over 80% of care. We operate on the front lines of the healthcare system by delivering medical training directly to these nurses.

Our approach stresses knowledge transference and local ownership: our medical education experts work closely with our local nurse trainers, who then train partner health center staff on-site once a month. We designed our curriculum for the local context and to align with the priorities of each country’s Ministry of Health, as well as the international community’s Millennium Development Goals and Post-2015 Development Agenda. The lesson plans cover best practices for addressing maternal, neonatal and child health, HIV/AIDS, malaria, reproductive health and more.

We train managerial staff at each of our partner health centers in financial management and accounting, pharmacy and human resource management, key data analysis, and planning and budgeting. With these skills, health centers avoid stock-outs, manage debt and break even or operate at a profit, ensuring their sustainability.

Health centers become thriving enterprises that plan for the future and reinvest with their own earnings, ensuring local sustainability.

Through our pharmaceutical supply program, we link rural partner health centers with local and regional wholesalers and deliver medicines directly to health centers. Before launching the program, we discovered health center nurses were often purchasing medicines themselves: spending days at a time traveling to the capital cities by public transportation in order to buy whatever was in stock at whatever price and quality available, before making the long return journey to their health centers.

Our supply program has dramatically decreased the occurrence of stock-outs in our partners’ pharmacies and increased the quality and variety of the medicines they offer. When we save staff time and resources, they can focus on saving lives.

Filling a gap in local capital markets, our growth financing loan program increases the scope of services health centers offer and the revenue they generate. Through this program, we have disbursed small to mid-sized loans that have financed the purchase of AMBUs, microscopes and other diagnostics, dental extraction tools and sterilizers. Partners are eligible to apply for loans once they achieve our quality standard, which is a score of 80% on our quality scorecard.

Our rent-to-own program allows individual health centers to pay a small fraction of the market value of an item of medical equipment – such as a delivery bed or a microscope – to rent the item from LN each month, gradually accumulating enough capital to purchase the equipment from LN outright.

Equipment loans create several multiplier effects. Because we pair equipment placement with ongoing training and check-ins, no equipment goes unused. Health centers generate more revenue when they offer expanded services made possible by additional equipment, while LifeNet generates revenue from loan repayment, which we reinvest directly into our four program verticals. The result: patients reap the rewards of better care.