Action For Health : Empowering Communities in Mali

Mali Health employs a strong team of Community Health Workers (CHWs) to ensure the health of children under five and pregnant women in the most vulnerable peri-urban communities of Bamako. These CHWs are members of our beneficiary communities, which facilitates community engagement and draws on local knowledge and strengths.

The mHealth project supports our health workers in managing community-based healthcare. Through the mobile phone app, CHWs collect specific information on children’s health, including vital signs like weight, height, and temperature. Mapped against the World Health Organization’s standards for healthy growth in children, if the information registered in the app indicates even a moderate level of under-nutrition, the app automatically prompts the health worker to connect the child and his or her caregiver to the formal health care system to seek treatment to help raise the child’s weight. The app also facilitates follow-up care, reminding CHWs which children in their case load have recently been treated and require more frequent in-home visits until the regimen is complete.

The health data collected through this project also allows Mali Health to track community trends and adapt our health education initiatives to respond to the realities in each community. This information can also be shared with local health clinics and local and regional affiliates of the Ministry of Health so that it can be included in regional and national health analyses.

Our current application was developed in 2014 in collaboration with D-Tree International and is used in the communities of Boulkassoumbougou, Lafiabougou, and Sotuba. For the next phase of our mHealth project, we’ve partnered with the Center for Expertise and Research in Telemedicine and e-Health (CERTES), a Malian company that specializes in health informatics. CERTES is developing a new application for our Action for Health program that expands upon the features of the current application and adds the ability to gather health data for the pregnant women and newborns in our programs. The new system uses a hybrid of CommCare, a mobile application used globally by field workers for data collection and case management, and DHIS2, an analytic application that is used to manage national health systems in several African countries. With this new system, we expect to expand mHealth at the end of May to six communities in total and 38 Community Health Workers using the mobile app.