Python, Django and RapidSMS have been my bread and butter since one Sunday afternoon, the 1st of August, 2009. I had just spent about 18 months on corporate business application development and was now venturing into the world of NGOs and open source software development–things that had had much influence for me to take the leap forward into the next adventures of my life.
It had not been an easy decision, but the prospect of working in an environment where I get to see my input work in improving health care, the opportunity to contribute to open source software and the fact that whatever code I wrote will be exposed to scrutiny by a lot more people all over the world was more than enough motivation. And of course, the chance to escape the traffic jams and concrete gardens of our capital, Nairobi, was icing on the cake. That afternoon, I was excited to be in Kisumu City to meet my boss as he outlined the work ahead of me and the promise that was in front of me to learn new things and make visible change.
On hand to make this transition for me successful was Matt Berg, Dr. Patrick Mutuo and Dr. James Wariero, my immediate supervisors, the MVP Sauri health team and the entire MVP Sauri Team. And of course, we had the Sauri Community Health Workers (CHWs), whom I have come to work closely with as they are the people on the ground utilizing the ChildCount+ system.
One friend and colleague, Samson Gejibo, really made it far much easier for me to hit the road running. ChildCount+ had just been on for close to a month, and I just joined in and continued with the CHW training and follow-up. The CHWs were excited to get immediate feedback from the system, and since Samson kept them on their toes, whenever we got a wrongly formatted message in the system we had to call them and remind them of the format. This saw considerable improvement in the quality of information that was collected and less mistakes.
Samson Gejibo explaining the Patient Registries to the CHWs
Thinking about it now, one of my first programming tasks was to generate a performance report that among other information indicated the accuracy of the CHWs in terms of the number of messages that were well formatted compared to the total number of messages that were sent per CHW. This performance report was shared with the CHWs by their Facilitators on weekly meetings; it was easier to identify which CHWs needed more training and also pushed them to be more accurate with their SMS reporting. All this experience enabled me to learn a lot about the python programming language as well as RapidSMS, the application framework that ChildCount+ is built upon.
Then came the measles campaign, the most hectic time so far and one of my most exciting and busy times with the project. The health team had the idea that they needed to know which children in the system were eligible for measles immunization, which among them had been vaccinated during the campaign period and which children the CHWs should concentrate on in trying to go to their homes to ensure that they were brought to the outposts and health facilities. We came up with a message format where CHWs could send the patient IDs of children who had been vaccinated: this message was communicated to the CHWs when they received a complete list of Children who were 9 months and older that they would be targeting in their outreach. It was simple enough for them to understand and those who had difficulty simply called in and the message format was explained to them. I received the most calls per day ever; it was a one-man call center, but it was worth it. With all the calls, the feedback exchange between the CHWs, facilitators and health team, the campaign was very successful.
Matt, Samson and I
It has been quite an experience: did one system rewrite and participated in another ChildCount+ implementation, took my first trip outside the country (to Uganda) as well as my first flight ever, participated in trainings (and at least now I can speak in front of a crowd), did demonstrations, as well as met very important people including Professor Jeffrey Sachs, and had an opportunity to make an impact on the Sauri cluster community through technology and my passion in programming.
Dickson’s work was recently mentioned in the NYTimes article: Shower of Aid Brings Flood of Progress. Samson is beginning a PhD program where he will focus on mobile health.
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