Guatemala, Pro Redes Salud: Rapid Scale-Up of Primary Health Care Through NGOs

Before the project began, 300,000 remote rural inhabitants in the Mayan highlands lacked basic primary care, the NGO civil society in health lacked cohesion, and the MOH NGO granting program needed revising. From 2000 to 2004, the NGO Networks Project implemented a grants program that helped form networks of NGOs, strengthening health services and testing innovations in service delivery, and improved monitoring and evaluation. As a result, by 2004, high-quality services had been extended to 317,000 rural people and surveys showed significant improvements in health care coverages, NGOs had been unified into networks, a national NGO federation had been formed, and innovations had been adopted by the MOH for improvements in the national MOH NGO program. [author’s description]