Progressive Health Partnership

PHP follows a community-based approach to healthcare delivery and social and economic development. The ideas for our programs emanate directly from the people we hope to serve – we learn from them about the most important problems they face, and we conduct assessments to quantify the greatest challenges in the communities where we work. Our initiatives are based on the suggestions of community members, who we involve in every step from developing to implementing programs.

We believe a community-based approach is important for several reasons. Because all communities are different, our projects must adopt a tailored approach in each locale. Only the poor themselves – not we, as outsiders – are true experts on their communities and the problems they face everyday of their lives. To be an effective organization, our advocacy and efforts on behalf of the poor must arise not from our expertise but from their own views and ideas. Additionally, placing project decisions in the hands of the people we serve ensures that our programs will be long-lasting and will be more effective in reaching the neediest people. Our work starts at the grassroots.

Through our community-based approach, our overarching goal is to eliminate two kinds of inequalities the poor experience: inequality in access to healthcare and inequality in incidence of disease. In other words, the poor not only have much less access to healthcare than better-off people throughout the world, but they also become ill at a much higher rate.

We are after high-quality healthcare for the poor

As a first step, we aim to deliver high-quality healthcare in the poor communities where we work. Our healthcare is high-quality because the poor deserve no less. And delivering such healthcare is an initial step to break the cycle of poverty and disease. In the short-term, we recognize that our programs will not be sustained by the poor themselves. In fact, we would never expect the poorest people on the planet to be able to independently support the provision of high-quality healthcare. So we maintain the highest standards, in accordance with our obligations to fulfill a basic level of human rights for the poor.

We tackle root causes to achieve lasting change

In the long-term, we aim to address the other basic but unfulfilled needs of the poor – such as financial services and education. By attacking the underlying social and economic factors that cause low access to healthcare and a high incidence of disease, we aim to achieve changes that will lead to sustainable improvements in the well-being of the poor.

Our advocacy complements our ground-level efforts

Our unfair global system also contains other social and economic factors which may not be alleviated simply through on-the-ground programs. That’s why we also work our hardest to give the poor a voice on the global stage and to alter the structural and transnational factors that inhibit their well-being.

Ultimately, our goal is to eliminate poverty and make our assistance unnecessary. We achieve all of these tasks through a mix of service, research, and advocacy.