By Allison Kozicharow; Edited by Elizabeth Fine
2025. With the U.S. administration’s sudden termination of USAID and other global health funding, millions of low-resource regions lost access to medicines, vaccines and basic health infrastructure almost overnight. The decision rapidly increased the risk to health and cost of life.
WiRED International acted quickly. Our motivation was to respond to budget slams to global health. Our solution was to directly address the resulting issues/problems by ramping up our programs to address the consequences that would result in low-resource communities.
Specifically, how did WiRED meet the challenge? Through expanding the content, the technology and the capacity of our programs.
WiRED’s Community Health Worker (CHW) Training
The first component of our work is crucial: increasing WiRED’s World Health Organization-compliant CHW training. Our pilot CHW team of 20 in Kisumu, Kenya — deployed in 2020 during the COVID 19 pandemic — today serves an average of 10,000 people with health issues each month. WiRED has quadrupled our CHW training programs and built a rigorous, two-semester CHW education program that has been adopted by a university in Kenya and is likely to be adopted by others.
WiRED’s Basic CHW Training program is being used in several West African countries as well. Further, we have translated the program into Ukrainian and have made it available to the besieged Ukrainian population. This comprehensive training package addresses infectious and non-communicable diseases as well as basic first aid and critical care.
Where vaccines and medicines once provided protection, WiRED has expanded education-based prevention programs so that CHWs can offer communities practical tools to protect themselves and provide palliative care when needed. Our CHWs are delivering intensive, face-to-face training that now reaches many underserved populations that would otherwise have nothing.
Where medical professionals and hospitals are scarce, CHWs act as vital and trusted health sources for their communities as they
- provide clinical services,
- conduct community-wide health education classes,
- operate routine health screening clinics,
- make home visits,
- act as bridges between their communities and professional medical services and
- perform follow-up visits.
WiRED’s Continuing Medical Education (CME) Program
WiRED International’s CME program provides free, peer-reviewed, downloadable and World Health Organization-required CME to CHWs and other healthcare personnel in low-resource regions globally. This critical program helps maintain and expand the skills of health workers, especially in today’s environment of dwindling health resources.
In 2025 WiRED launched an innovative CME tracker app that allows CHWs to study hundreds of training modules and automatically maintain their credits. This program is freely available to CHWs globally, trained by WiRED or other organizations. The app is fast, easy and free, elevating CHW training through WiRED’s creative technology.
HealthMAP: Distribution and Access to WiRED’s Programs
This year WiRED significantly upgraded our critical mobile app, HealthMAP, so that our entire training library can be delivered instantly to CHWs anywhere in the world — taught by WiRED or other programs. HealthMAP enables CHWs to download modules and study them offline.
The app is now available for both Android users and Apple users.
New Modules and Module Series
WiRED’s volunteers worked overtime to create dozens of new trainings for our health education library of hundreds of courses. WiRED regularly adds urgent training modules posted for emerging infectious diseases as any arise, such as avian flu and diphtheria this year. Modules are free to download for personal use, school, group and community presentations.
One particular three-part module series, When ARVs Are Gone, provides symptoms management and support for people living with HIV when antiretrovirals are gone. WiRED’s aim with this training series is to provide compassionate assistance to people whose lives are being sacrificed for minimal cost savings.
Another WiRED launch in 2025 was the five-module One Health Series, a training curriculum around the concept that human, animal and environmental health are interconnected. Climate change, population movement, food insecurity, zoonotic disease and environmental degradation have made integrated health strategies essential in understanding and treating the problem. Underserved communities are especially affected, yet they often lack access to education that explains these risks. WiRED’s comprehensive One Health training program prepares CHWs for climate change and environmental challenges through closer scrutiny of community health threats. The program stresses the need for CHWs to provide information about rising health risks to officials and higher-level medical authorities.
New Infectious Disease Prevention and Treatment Animation Series
By the end of 2025, WiRED released a series of animations designed to engage regular community members in a consolidated effort, with CHWs and medical teams, to avoid the spread of communicable illnesses — now on a steep rise. The animation series will be used in schools and by CHWs in their community health training sessions. We welcome anyone interested in teaching about infectious disease to use these videos in their training programs.
WiRED’s New Infectious Disease Prevention and Treatment Animation Series includes:
- Infectious Disease Basics
Recognizing Signs and Symptoms of Illness- Personal Hygiene and Healthy Living
- Water Sanitation and Purification
- Fighting Cholera Together.
Publications
In April 2025 the journal Frontiers in Public Health published a paper co-written by WiRED International Medical Programs Director Maryam Othman, M.D., M.P.H., and WiRED Executive Director Gary Selnow, Ph.D. The article is entitled “Community Health Workers: A Narrative Review of a Curriculum and Training Program for Low-Income Communities Facing Limited Access to Healthcare.”
The journal just announced the inclusion of the article as part of a book, Science Diplomacy and Neocolonialism: Lessons from the Field with a View to the Future. The publication features 15 articles and 72 authors.
WiRED encourages you to read the article and learn about the impact of CHWs.
Looking Ahead
In 2025 WiRED laid the groundwork to meet the challenges 2026 will surely bring in global health. With your generous help, we are eager to begin the new year as we continue to add new trainings, especially for CHWs, and to use technology to make these projects available to all.
A Final Thought
At WiRED, we take pride in being a volunteer-driven organization that directs 95% of every donation straight to our work abroad and program development. Because we eliminate administration and fundraising costs, your support goes exactly where it is needed most. As we expand to meet rising global health threats, our programming expenses have grown alongside our impact. We invite our donors to consider the efficiency of our model and the life-saving value we provide to low-resource communities worldwide.
