Sustainability of community-based workers in multisectoral food security programs: a case study of producer leaders, village vaccinators, mother leaders, and community health workers in Burkina Faso

Abstract The community-based worker (CBW) model is commonly used by food security projects as an approach to catalyze community-driven development and to enhance long-term sustainability of project impacts in rural areas of low-income countries. However, there is limited follow-up research exploring how CBWs continue to carry out expected activities in the years that follow project exit. This case study examines how four different CBW roles—producer leaders, village vaccinators, community healthcare workers, mother leaders—all trained to contribute to the food security goals of a multi-year initiative in Kaya, Burkina Faso, sustained their respective activities post-project. Two years after the project ended, we collected qualitative data to examine how well these CBWs continued providing the activities that they had been trained to provide as expected by the project. We employ a conceptual framework of sustainability and exit strategies to assess what factors contributed to sustained activities and, where activities ceased, what caused them to stop. We find that where activities were sustained, all four hypothesized factors—sustained capacities, resources, motivation, and linkages—were present. We conclude by discussing key lessons and considerations for using the CBW model: (1) gradually transition to independent operation during project lifetime; (2) integrate CBWs into permanent and functional systems through gradual project exit; (3) professionalize the CBW role (re-think the volunteer approach); (4) what to do about resources and (5) co-develop endogenous definitions and indicators from the project onset.