Meridian is a partner on the Cambodia Worker Health Coalition (WorkerHealth) a two-year, USAID-supported initiative to ensure that workers, particularly women, have greater access to quality health services that meet their needs and improve their reproductive health.

As a platform for collective action, WorkerHealth is designed to create industry wide impact in partnership with leading brands as well as with workers, factories and other key industry stakeholders. WorkerHealth works with government, industry and NGO partners to put in place systemic changes in the way workers access health services and factories address the health needs of their workers. It aims to achieve significant and long-lasting impact through four complimentary mechanisms:

• Better access to quality health services
• Improved worker-management relations
• Improved workplace policies
• Evidence of ‘what works’

Meridian is leading the effort to improve workplace policies as a way to create an enabling environment to sustain changes. To be truly effective, workplace interventions must reach the majority of workers and lead to changes that can take root and grow. WorkerHealth is underpinned by this understanding. Achieving sustainable impact and scale requires engagement by all sectors and action at multiple levels – from the factory and infirmary practices to community health services and government and industry policies.

The WorkerHealth platform is designed to enable industry stakeholders to work together on common solutions and collective action. It promotes the coordination of resources and activities by brands, factories, labor, government, donors, and NGOs. Finally, WorkerHealth offers a mechanism for brands, industry, and new donors to leverage existing and new investments in worker health for much greater impact.

WorkerHealth is a joint initiative managed by Marie Stopes International and the Population Council’s Evidence Project and funded by USAID/Cambodia.