Why better data means better care for communities

Sub-Saharan Africa, like many other countries across the world, is facing a health workforce challenge.  Amref has been training the health workforce in sub-Saharan Africa for more than six decades. Using in-person training, as well as digital and mobile technologies, Amref reaches health workers with the training content they need to keep them up to date.

Amref has a number of technologies that have worked really well in our context, particularly our three digital platforms Jibu, Leap and M-Jali, but with COVID-19 it became even more apparent how important they were to reach health workers with critical information to help keep them and the communities that they serve safe.

It also shone a light on the gaps; while each platform was performing well with its individual focus, we were missing the opportunity to learn more from the data because the platforms weren’t talking to one another.

We needed to find a way of connecting them, so we could understand the end-to-end perspective of training; from what content was being provided to health workers on various health topics through Leap and Jibu, to how they were using that new knowledge in their service delivery to communities and how that was reflected in the household and community-level health data being collected through M-Jali.

The integration of these multiple, complex legacy tools into a single digital platform means so much more than just health worker training and collecting data. It is about making the services that these health workers provide to millions of people across the region better by ensuring trained health workers are focussing on giving the communities that need the most help the right sort of help at the right time. That is pushing us forward, towards our vision of lasting health change in Africa.

Listen to the Tech for Good podcast here to go behind the scenes on the digital platform integration project to learn how project leaders at Amref, Cognizant and GSK made it all happen.