ChildCount.org

Part of the ChildCount+ implementation process involves the daunting task of registering all members of the community. Community Health Workers across all MVP sites are equipped with a standardized paper registration form. The form includes fields for Health ID numbers, First Name, Family Name, Gender, Age/DOB, Head of Household Health ID, etc. Community Health Workers fill out the fields either by referencing community member’s health booklets or by briefly interviewing them.

In Mbola, Tanzania, we have begun a registration form trial exercise in a village called Lolangulu. The trial began on Monday, 14 June, and we have already experienced two issues with the process.

• One of the Head of Households has two wives in two separate villages. This raises some interesting and challenging questions. Do we register the Head of Household in one village and not the other or in both villages? If we are to use one location, when we register the other household members from the other village, which Head of Household location should be used?
• With the focus of ChildCount+ on newborn, maternal and child health, only Children Under 5, Expectant Mothers and Heads of Households are registered. Many household members ask why this is the case. Maybe we should think about possibility of registering all household members seen during the visit.

Despite such challenges, the overall process is going well, and I am confident that some of the issues above and mistakes that may arise will be addressed during the retraining process.

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Jackline Oluoch, a Regional Community Health Worker Program Coordinator based in Nairobi, recently wrote an article on the workshop held to introduce CHWs to the ChildCount+ system held in Nairobi.  The article, The MVP Introduces Enhanced Mobile Technology to Reduce Child and Maternal Mortality, gives an overview of the objectives of the workshop and the anticipated outcome.  Overall, the workshop was successful and provided much need cross-site interactions.

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The following is from a posting by Dr. Prabhjot Singh Dhadialla, our CHW team leader, on the ICT4CHW mailing list, an excellent discussion, started by Neal Lesh and others, on using technology to enable CHW programs.

CHW Programs within MVP

I’m currently the Community Health Worker and Health System advisor to the MVP. In this post I’ll give some background about the Millennium Villages Project, the Health component/CHW program and then a bit about our approach to technology usage. It may seem like a long preamble to getting to the ICT, but I’ll say something about why I’ve done this at the end. In addition, I’ll speak about ongoing scale-up work:

The Millennium Villages Project

The MVP was designed to consolidate the world’s current implementation knowledge about achieving the Millennium Development Goals and put them into action throughout challenging terrains in Sub-Saharan Africa. Located in 10 countries at 14 sites, the first wave of Millennium Villages are clusters of about 40 to 80 thousand people — ~450,000 in total. The clusters were identified through a process that requires a national government to request MV presence in the country [1]. This triggers a process of identifying areas of high need and then working with the districts to find candidate communities where there was enthusiasm for the process.

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