The United Nations is coordinating efforts to assist Africa to add 1 million community health workers by the end of this year to help the continent achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Monday.

Three of the eight MDGs are related to health.

"I want to congratulate African governments for working to help its people and showing keener interest in development especially now that the deadline for MDGs is only a few days away," said Ban on the sidelines of the 20th Ordinary Session of the African Union Summit held in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa.

African countries face severe shortage of health workers because of the inability of the governments to absorb them into the national health system due to limited public health budget. Community health workers provide opportunity for mobile-community based health workers whose services are cheaper and are not necessarily a drain to the government.

According to the Earth Institute, which has been running community health workers project through its Millennium Villages project, the workers are paid an average of 80 U.S. dollars per month, less than a half of what a clinical nursing officer is paid per month in a country like Kenya.

Some of the roles they play include testing and treating malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia, screening tuberculosis, deworming and coordinating ambulance services.

They attend patients in their homes therefore reducing the time it takes to get to the closest health center, a distance that may be tens of kilometers away leading to death of the patient because of delayed medical attention.

They are also best placed to life-saving health services especially in the remote areas. Their effectiveness and response time has been improved tremendously by the wide use of the mobile phone that can be used to call for their services and also to take instructions for a medial doctor.

UN is currently involved in supporting training for the community health workers through physical and technology aided training to ensure the numbers are achieved by the end of this year.

"Our intention is to press on for progress against malaria, HIV/ AIDS infections and improve health among the children. We want to achieve zero HIV infections among the newly born children," said Ban Ki-moon.

MDGs targeted for achievement through training of community health workers include that of reducing by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the number of children who die before they achieve the age of five years. World Health Organization (WHO) data indicates that 6.9 million children under five died in 2011. Almost 75 percent of all child deaths are attributable to just six conditions: neonatal causes, pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria, measles, and HIV/AIDS.

The other MDG target is to improve maternal health by reducing by three quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio and achieve universal access to reproductive health by 2015.

WHO data indicated that up to 358,000 women die each year in pregnancy and childbirth and that most of them die because they had no access to skilled routine and emergency care, indicating the importance of community health workers. The third MDG target relating to health is to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases. Endi