How digital solutions are helping bridge the healthcare gap
By 2030, the World Health Organization (WHO) projects Africa will face a shortage of 6.1 million health workers. For every missing health worker, hundreds of people are forced to go without the healthcare they need.
Today, only about 48% of people in Africa can get the health services they need, meaning approximately 615 million people are not getting their essential health needs met.
We need more trained health workers to bridge this gap. Yet, taking health workers out of the health system to train them means health centres are left short-staffed. Digital solutions help train health workers while they work to serve their communities.
The health worker shortage in Africa
Amref Health Africa's digital learning and data collection tools are helping up-skill health workers at all levels of the health system across 35 African countries.
Mobile training for Community Health Workers
Since 2013, Amref Health Africa has partnered with organizations such as Accenture, M-Pesa Foundation, Safaricom, Vodafone, and the Government of Kenya to develop a sustainable and scalable mobile learning academy for health workers and Community Health Workers (CHWs) across Africa. This partnership led to the creation of LEAP, an integrated mobile health platform that enhances the skills of health workers through regular updates and peer-to-peer communication.
LEAP is compatible with both smart and basic mobile devices, using SMS and audio messages to deliver training modules that CHWs can complete at their own pace. Interactive quizzes test their knowledge, making the training process flexible and accommodating for CHWs, who often balance full-time jobs and family responsibilities with their volunteer work.
CHWs are critical in bringing health services closer to the communities which they serve. This flexibility eliminates the need for them to take time away from their jobs or families for classroom-based training.
Mobile and digital learning through COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of these innovative mobile and digital tools. They enabled Amref to quickly reach over 200,000 health workers across 10 countries to address critical new training needs in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Integrating mobile learning and data collection
In 2023, we partnered with GSK and Cognizant to integrate three mobile learning and data collection tools - our mobile learning platforms LEAP and JIBU, and data collection tool M-Jali - into a new platform to better plan, identify and respond to health worker training needs at the community level.
This single windowpane view will allow better strategic decision-making driven by data insights and sharing of more accurate information across the health system, enabling thousands of health workers to access quality, tailored training to reach millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa.
Read more about the integration project here, or watch this explainer video.
“It’s really helping me achieve my dream [as it is] a very fast track for nurses who are qualified enrolled nurses to get through to the other side to be diploma-holders,”
In 2022, the nurse-to-patient ratio in Zambia was an alarming 1:1,496,011, far from the ideal 1:700 (WHO recommendation).
The Zambian Ministry of Health aimed to double the health workforce by 2025, to strengthen the primary healthcare system and move closer to universal health coverage. As part of this goal, they required all practising nurses to up-skill from Certificate to Diploma level. The Diploma was a standard two-year, classroom-based course.
Yet taking nurses out of the system for extended training periods would leave a staff gap in the health centres.
Amref worked with the Nurses and Midwives Council of Zambia to use JIBU, the digital learning solution, to create and implement an accelerated one-year mobile-based Diploma nursing course. This initiative upskilled over 1,200 enrolled nurses to registered Diploma nurses. The digital format allows nurses to study while continuing their work, ensuring that critically needed nurses remain active in the health system.
Sibusisiwe Munkonde is one of the certificate nurse who enrolled in the abridged nursing Diploma. She says: "The abridged course has content containing books [for studying] and a quiz [for testing while learning]. You [can] attempt a quiz at any time. And then there is a platform [to check] for answers. This platform is very easily accessible. You just have to download it. Once you download it you have it be on your laptop or on your phone, it comes up like an app."
Read more about the Zambia project
Read more from Sibusisiwe and about the JIBU accelerated course for Zambian nurses in our 2023 Impact Report.
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