Why we deliver care at the Doorstep
Because Care Starts at Home
Most health systems are built to be found. They are designed for families who know where to go, can afford to get there and arrive during opening hours. For smallholder farming families in rural Malawi, pregnant, still working the land, hours from the nearest facility, that design has never worked.
Wandikweza delivers care at the doorstep because the doorstep is where the decisions that matter most are made. The decision to seek care. The moment a danger sign is first felt. The point at which a complication is still preventable. By the time a family reaches a facility, that moment has often already passed.
A Community Health Worker or midwife who arrives at a household before a need is urgent does more than deliver a service. She builds a relationship that makes the next visit possible, explains what to look for before there is anything to see and connects a family to every layer of a system that will follow them from before the first pregnancy to the child's fifth birthday.
Because care starts at home. That is where Wandikweza begins.
A Community Health Worker conducts a doorstep postnatal visit with a mother and her newborn at their home in rural Malawi.
The visit is part of a scheduled, continuous follow-up sequence that began during pregnancy and continues through the first weeks of a newborn's life, the period when both mother and child are most vulnerable to complications that, if missed, become life-threatening.
The CHW checks the mother's recovery, assesses the newborn's weight and feeding, identifies any warning signs and maintains the household record that connects this family to every other layer of the Proactive Doorstep Care system. No transport. No waiting. Care at the door.
A Midwife on Wheels arrives at a household in rural Malawi.
Getting to a facility is not always possible. Roads flood. Transport costs money families do not have. Labour does not wait. The Midwife on Wheels layer exists because skilled maternal care cannot always be waited for, it has to move. A trained midwife, deployed on a motorbike, can reach households and communities that no clinic van can access and no family can easily travel from.
He arrives with the clinical skills to assess, to treat, to refer and with a record of the woman she is visiting, because the CHW who identified her first has already logged everything the midwife needs to know. This is a scheduled, proactive visit, care going to people, not people going to care.
A Wandikweza Mobile Outreach Clinic in session, bringing maternal and child healthcare directly into the community.
Unlike Midwives on Wheels, who travel household-to-household for skilled maternal follow-up, the Mobile Outreach Clinic functions as a temporary health facility set up within the community on scheduled days.
Women and children receive comprehensive services including ANC, PNC, HIV testing and counselling, family planning, laboratory testing, medicines, and nutrition support all in one place, closer to home.
The clinic is part of a continuous care system. CHWs identify and mobilize families, outreach teams provide clinical care and follow-up continues through midwives and Community Health Workers to ensure mothers and children remain connected to care.
