COVID-19 disproportionately affects the poor and vulnerable. Community health workers are poised to play a pivotal role in fighting the pandemic, especially in countries with less resilient health systems. Drawing from practitioner expertise across four WHO regions, this article outlines the targeted actions needed at different stages of the pandemic to achieve the following goals: (1) PROTECT healthcare workers, (2) INTERRUPT the virus, (3) MAINTAIN existing healthcare services while surging their capacity, and (4) SHIELD the most vulnerable from socioeconomic shocks. While decisive action must be taken now to blunt the impact of the pandemic in countries likely to be hit the hardest, many of the investments in the supply chain, compensation, dedicated supervision, continuous training and performance management necessary for rapid community response in a pandemic are the same as those required to achieve universal healthcare and prevent the next epidemic.

Healthcare delivery in the rural developing world is limited by a severe shortage of health workers as well as profound communicative and geographic barriers. Understaffed hospitals are forced to provide care for patients that reside at a great distance from the institutions themselves, sometimes more than 100 miles away. Community health workers (CHWs), volunteers from local villages, have been integral in bridging this patient-physician gap, but still lose enormous of amounts of time in transit between hospital and village. We report the results of a retrospective mobile health (mHealth) pilot at St. Gabriel's Hospital in Malawi designed to eliminate many of these trips in favor of communication via text messages. A group of 75 CHWs were supplied with cell phones and trained to utilize the network for a variety of usage cases, including patient adherence reporting, appointment reminders, and physician queries. At the end of the pilot, the hospital saved approximately 2,048 hours of worker time, $2,750 on net ($3,000 in fuel savings minus $250 in operational costs), and doubled the capacity of the tuberculosis treatment program (up to 200 patients). We conclude that mHealth interventions can provide cost-effective solutions to communication barriers in the setting of rural hospitals in the developing world.

Immediately after a disaster such as the earthquake that struck Haiti, it is natural to think of the necessities: food, water, sanitation, housing. But Inveneo's experience demonstrates how a new factor has entered the equation: access to the Internet and other communications technologies. These services are now a critical component of disaster recovery-just as they will be a critical part of Haiti's longterm rebuilding process. In our work with Haiti over the last seven months, we have seen firsthand how Inveneo's services can save lives.After the earthquake, international technology nonprofits, U.S. government officials, Haitian telecommunications companies, and Silicon Valley start-ups banded together to deploy an SMS-based emergency reporting channel for the affected population. The timeline of the collaboration was intense; the first four days of the group Skype chat fills a 300-page document.On the day of the earthquake, crisis mapping organization Ushahidi launched a platform that allowed reports to be processed through email, web form, Twitter, or major news outlets. In a country where 30 times more people have access to mobile phones than to land lines or the Internet, the largest available channels for communicating needs were mobile phones and SMS. Within 24 hours of the quake, FrontlineSMS:Medic, Ushahidi, the U.S. State Department, and Digicel, Haiti's largest telecommunications company, were working to establish a system to organize a flood of text messages from the ground.On January 16th, working with the Thomson Reuters Foundation and InSTEDD, the Project 4636 system was launched and word of the free service was spread to community radio stations throughout Haiti: "Report emergencies and missing persons by texting to 4636." Later outreach asked those texting to include their need and location. Once an SMS was received by the mobile operator, it was transferred to a website where roughly 1,000 members of the Haitian diaspora translated, mapped, and categorized every message. These structured reports were

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