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Saving children’s lives through Care Groups

New!  See the new Care Group Video (FH) and Family Planning lesson plans/flip charts for use in Care Groups (Set #3)…

Welcome to Care Group Info! In Collaboration with the CORE Group, staff of Food for the Hungry and World Relief have created this site to share information, presentations, tools, curricula, and results reports regarding Care Group programs.

A Care Group is a group of 10-15 volunteer, community-based health educators who regularly meet together with NGO project staff for training and supervision.  Each of these volunteers then go out at least monthly to do health promotion with a small cohort of mothers of young children.   They are different from typical mothers  groups in that each volunteer is responsible for regularly visiting 10-15 of her neighbors, sharing what she has learned and facilitating behavior change at the household level.  Care Groups create a multiplying effect to equitably reach every beneficiary household with interpersonal behavior change communication.  They also provide the structure for a community health information system that reports on new pregnancies, births and deaths detected during home visits.  The model was created by World Relief in 1995 and pioneered by Food for the Hungry and World Relief since then.

Since 1995, World Relief, Food for the Hungry, and 20 other nongovernmental organizations (see Implementers page) in more than 20 countries have adopted the Care Group model, largely with the support of the US Agency for International Development.  The CORE Group has helped document and disseminate the model, and there has been increased attention to the model and its effectiveness in lowering child deaths (e.g,, see UNICEF’s 2008 State of the World’s Children Report).  We hope that this site will help your organization, government, church, or club to create and use Care Groups to help eliminate child deaths in developing countries.

For any questions or comments about this page, please contact Tom Davis at tdavisATfh.org.

Care Group in Mozambique