A Fair Incentive Scheme for Community Health Workers
Avinandan Bose, Tracey Li, Arunesh Sinha, Tien Mai
Abstract
Community health workers (CHWs) play a crucial role in the last mile delivery of essential health services to underserved populations in low-income countries. Many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) provide training and support to enable CHWs to deliver health services to their communities, with no charge to the recipients of the services. This includes monetary compensation for the work that CHWs perform, which is broken down into a series of well defined tasks. In this work, we partner with a NGO D-Tree International to design a fair monetary compensation scheme for tasks performed by CHWs in the semi-autonomous region of Zanzibar in Tanzania, Africa. In consultation with stakeholders, we interpret fairness as the equal opportunity to earn, which means that each CHW has the opportunity to earn roughly the same total payment over a given T month period, if the CHW reacts to the incentive scheme almost rationally. We model this problem as a reward design problem for a Markov Decision Process (MDP) formulation for the CHWs’ earning. There is a need for the mechanism to be simple so that it is understood by the CHWs, thus, we explore linear and piecewise linear rewards in the CHWs’ measured units of work. We solve this design problem via a novel policy-reward gradient result. Our experiments using two real world parameters from the ground provide evidence of reasonable incentive output by our scheme.
BibTeX
@article{Bose_Li_Sinha_Mai_2023, title={A Fair Incentive Scheme for Community Health Workers}, volume={37}, url={https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/26653}, DOI={10.1609/aaai.v37i12.26653}, abstractNote={Community health workers (CHWs) play a crucial role in
the last mile delivery of essential health services to underserved
populations in low-income countries. Many nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) provide training and
support to enable CHWs to deliver health services to their
communities, with no charge to the recipients of the services.
This includes monetary compensation for the work that
CHWs perform, which is broken down into a series of well defined
tasks. In this work, we partner with a NGO D-Tree
International to design a fair monetary compensation scheme
for tasks performed by CHWs in the semi-autonomous region
of Zanzibar in Tanzania, Africa. In consultation with
stakeholders, we interpret fairness as the equal opportunity
to earn, which means that each CHW has the opportunity to
earn roughly the same total payment over a given T month
period, if the CHW reacts to the incentive scheme almost rationally.
We model this problem as a reward design problem
for a Markov Decision Process (MDP) formulation for the
CHWs’ earning. There is a need for the mechanism to be
simple so that it is understood by the CHWs, thus, we explore
linear and piecewise linear rewards in the CHWs’ measured
units of work. We solve this design problem via a novel
policy-reward gradient result. Our experiments using two real
world parameters from the ground provide evidence of reasonable
incentive output by our scheme.}, number={12}, journal={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, author={Bose, Avinandan and Li, Tracey and Sinha, Arunesh and Mai, Tien}, year={2023}, month={Jun.}, pages={14127-14135} }