Five steps to wrap technology and optimize impact: community malaria surveillance for elimination in Zambia
By Anna Winters on December 5, 2018 in Malaria, News
Image caption: Community health workers (CHWs) provide malaria testing and treatment; line-lists in paper registers and aggregated by “data” CHWs and submitted to the DHIS2. Malaria data are mapped to both CHW posts and health facilities.
Akros supports countries and their partners to design, test, and deploy interventions to scale for impact. Often this involves supporting governments to transition from paper-based to digital data collection and reporting. Below is a case study which outlines our approach of applying simple technology that is wrapped in the necessary processes, protocols, and trainings to deliver quality data and build intervention impact that scales.
The Government of Zambia (GRZ) has an ambitious goal of malaria elimination by 2021. One approach to achieve this goal is to improve malaria surveillance at the community level. Akros worked alongside the National Malaria Elimination Program and PATH-MACEPA to develop a community-based malaria surveillance system called “Component D.” The goal of Component D is to build community structures that will increase access to malaria testing and treating, identify and eliminate parasite reservoirs, and understand where (within health facility catchments) malaria transmission is happening. Effectively: to better understand and respond to the “needle in the haystack” which malaria can often be.
To assist the GRZ, Akros applied its five-part approach of “wrapping” technology with the processes, protocols, and training that ensure the technology contributes to impact and is able to scale:
- Discover and assess—we explored the systems that were already in place in Zambia, evaluated the data needs, and identified the change agents that needed to understand and action information.
- Build a “prototype design”—we leveraged simple technology (java feature phones and open data kit software) and documented and developed the processes, protocols, training materials, and supervision needed to support that technology and make it sustainable. We built feedback loops to assist programs to respond to those data.
- Work with country governments and partners to test the design through small-scale implementation—we implemented Component D in Southern, Central, and Lusaka Province, Zambia.
- Wrap that implementation with research to understand cost efficiency and disease impact—we learned that Component D was one of the primary drivers expanding access to care and treating reservoirs of parasite infection.
- Work with our host governments and partners to iterate and smartly scale—from its initial small-scale implementation, Component D has become country policy. Since then, numerous partners and GRZ have now expanded to 36 districts in Zambia.
