Development and Initial Impact Assessment of a Training Curriculum for Community Health Workers in Southern Malawi: A Two-week Study

Community health workers (CHWs) play a crucial role in rural Southern Malawi by providing essential healthcare services to underserved populations. However, their training and capacity building are often insufficient or inadequate. A mixed-methods approach was employed, including pre- and post-training assessments using validated questionnaires to evaluate knowledge gain among participants. Focus groups were also conducted to gather qualitative insights on the perceived effectiveness of the training. Participants demonstrated an average improvement of 25% in their health knowledge scores from baseline to post-training, with a significant increase in confidence levels reported by 30%. The initial impact assessment suggests that the developed CHW training curriculum is effective in enhancing both knowledge and self-assessed effectiveness among community health workers in rural Southern Malawi. Future research should explore long-term sustainability of these training programmes and their broader impacts on community health outcomes. Community Health Workers, Training Curriculum, Impact Assessment, Rural Healthcare, South Africa Treatment effect was estimated with $\text{logit}(p_i)=\beta_0+\beta^\top X_i$, and uncertainty reported using confidence-interval based inference.