CHIC’s CEO and co-founder Dr. Madeleine Ballard wins the Roux Prize on behalf of Community Health Impact Coalition in recognition of the Coalition’s research and advocacy contributions to health.
On behalf of the Community Health Impact Coalition, Dr. Madeleine Ballard, global health leader and CEO of CHIC, is the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s 2024 Roux Prize winner. The award recognizes our shared work towards securing quality care for all, through evidence-based health systems, benefiting millions of people across the world.
Half of the world’s population lacks access to essential health services. Around the globe, CHWs have stepped up to address this critical gap and deliver care in a way that improves access, increases equity, and saves lives. Despite their vital work, many CHWs remain unsalaried, unsupervised, and unequipped, so they are not set up to succeed in global health goals. CHIC has played a key role in influencing guidelines, increasing funding, and advancing the development of national policies needed to make professional CHWs the norm everywhere.
“Millions of community health workers play a critical role in regions where resources are scarce and where marginalized populations face significant barriers to care. The Roux Prize seeks to recognize global health leaders like Dr. Ballard and organizations such as CHIC who drive innovation, ambition, and collaboration. Through meticulous research, advocacy, and activation work, CHIC is addressing health disparities and improving access to health care,”
Dr. Chris Murray, Director, IHME
Amidst a worsening shortage of health workers, major health institutions are aiming to expand their workforce by 2030. By building a multi-country coalition of CHWs, advocates, and researchers, CHIC brings together stakeholders address critical health, data, and implementation challenges that no one organization could solve alone.
“Being part of the research team at CHIC has given me a chance to bring real issues affecting the community I serve and my CHW colleagues to research. This means that the research findings better reflect community needs and expectations. Being involved in research also up-skills us, gives us a platform for career progression and allows us to raise our voices towards change.”
Dickson Nansima Mbewe, Senior Health Surviellance Assistant, Ministry of Health Malawi
This collaborative effort has resulted in significant achievements, including the first-ever WHO guideline on CHWs, USAID’s flagship CHW program evaluation tool, and the first-ever guidanceon creating national georeferenced community health worker master lists. The impact of this work does not end at global guidelines. The Coalition also leverages evidence to win commitments from major development aid providers and policymakers.
“Community health workers are the backbone of our health systems, yet their critical contributions are systemically overlooked. Years of rigorous research have shown that CHWs are essential to improving health outcomes, lowering costs, and increasing equity. But only if they’re treated like professionals – with salaries, skills, supervision, and supplies. We must translate this research into action – our work is about setting up CHWs for success in providing quality care for all, including those who provide it.”
Dr Madeleine Ballard, CEO, Community Health Impact Coalition
Now in its 11th year, the Roux Prize has been recognizing individuals all over the globe who have leveraged evidence-based health data to improve population health. The Roux Prize is awarded by the IHME at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine. Dr Ballard has been a strong advocate for using routine data collected during programmatic care delivery in research, and she sees many parallels between the Global Burden of Disease study as a hub for informing global health initiatives and CHIC’s own proCHW Policy Dashboard, a scoreboard for the proCHW movement.
“The Roux Prize will help advance our collaborative research and CHIC’s use of evidence to
influence guidelines, funding, and policy to improve population health in multiple countries
around the world. This recognition is transformative for the Coalition as it
will help expand our work creating proCHW guidelines, increasing funding, and ultimately
impacting the millions of CHWs and patients we serve.”
Dr Madeleine Ballard, CEO, Community Health Impact Coalition
Dr. Ballard is a Rhodes Scholar, recipient of the Harvard Women’s Leadership Award, and co-chair of the Anti-Racism Task Force at the Arnhold Institute for Global Health of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she is on faculty. As the Roux Prize winner, Dr. Ballard will receive $100,000 that will be used to advance CHIC’s work on establishing professional CHW policies in 95 countries.
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