Renette Olivier

Renette Olivier, R.N., is the long-time Program Coordinator for Global Health Action’s Community Health Worker (CHW) Training Program in Darbonne, Haiti. She has been with GHA since 1992 and had known GHA and the program for nearly a decade before that as a district nurse and clinical supervisor employed by the Haitian Ministry of Health. After close to 20 years, she has led a program that has recruited, trained, and supported more than 1,200 community health workers, who work in the Leogane District and throughout Haiti!

As the Program Coordinator, she plans the curriculum, leads the training, manages and supervises the other program trainers, recruits new CHW candidates, provides on-going technical support, and follows up on the CHWs in – and with – their communities. Renette insists that to understand the true situation, issues, and problems (in order to supervise and realistically prepare the CHWs), one must regularly visit the remote mountain communities where so many Haitians live. Given the rugged landscape and the widely-dispersed homes, that can mean a 10-minute hike just to reach the closest neighbor within the “community.”

When she speaks of the impact of the community health workers and GHA’s training program, she mentions vaccination campaigns, health promotion and disease prevention, children’s nutrition, educating parents about how to care for the children, tetanus shots, and much more. She emphasizes that because there are so few doctors in Haiti, the Community Health Workers have more responsibilities than in most other countries. There is also a cultural impact:

After the program started, people learned and understood that it was disease and germs, not evil spirits, that cause illness, and those are preventable. Then, the people could see that they had the power to prevent disease in their families and promote good health.

I feel very good about my job helping the “agents de santé.” They also organize and mobilize their communities to work together to build latrines, have better sanitation, and do other projects that benefit everyone. . . . If Global Health Action hadn’t started the training program, none of this work would have been possible.