News (OLD) - Page 3 of 11

When good leadership meets smart technology for malaria prevention

By Parysa Oskouipour on October 30, 2019 in Health Data Systems, Malaria, News

On a sweltering summer day in Siavonga, a lakeside jewel of Zambia’s Southern Province, I sat down with Mr. Bisael Phiri, the District Surveillance Officer for Siavonga District, to get his perspective on the malaria situation in his region and at large in Zambia. A breeze lazily floating through an open window and a small desktop fan provided the only reprieve from the oppressive heat as we got down to brass tacks about the progress made in the last few seasons of malaria interventions and how Reveal has impacted that progress.

Team members using Reveal-enabled tablets during an IRS campaign.

Mr. Phiri has been working in public health for several years, and is a big picture thinker when it comes to tackling malaria in Zambia. His motivations to work in this field are straightforward, “I know the kind of impact that good health can have on people’s lives. I wanted to do this work to help change the environment so it doesn’t constitute a danger to the public.” His work is based in one of the select districts of Southern Province that utilizes Reveal for their indoor residual spraying (IRS), mass drug administration (MDA), and reactive IRS malaria interventions through a PATH MACEPA and Akros-implemented program. Reveal is a powerful, open-source platform that aids in household-level intervention management and data authenticity by using spatial intelligence and smart planning tools. Mr. Phiri stresses that learning how to use this technology is self-explanatory and that the dashboards, which are tailored to his administrative level, greatly assist his day-to-day responsibilities. In his own words, “the dashboard is important to view on a daily basis because it identifies the status of various teams and shows us where we need to go and where the problem areas are. When we have this information, we can change our strategy based on how well our teams are performing, and change targets midway if need be. For instance, if I didn’t receive updated data from a certain district, I would not know that there’s an issue there. Now because I have these data, I would be able to make a quick plan for how best to move forward with that district.”

Beyond program planning, Mr. Phiri’s work is strengthened by the hard proof the platform provides that work is being done where it is supposed to be done.

Reveal takes aim at malaria parasite through mass drug administration campaigns in Southern Province, Zambia

By Parysa Oskouipour on September 18, 2019 in Health Data Systems, Malaria, News

Deep in Zambia’s Southern Province, in a town a three-hour drive away from the district’s largest city and economic hub (Siavonga), lies Manchamvwa Health Facility. This clinic serves as the focal point for the health needs of hundreds of people who live in the surrounding villages, and as such, is often overwhelmed with the many health needs of its patients. Malaria season in particular tends to put a great strain on the facility, with peak periods in previous years seeing anywhere from 100 to 200 cases per month.

Over the last couple of years, the Government of the Republic of Zambia (GRZ), with the assistance of Akros and PATH’s Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Malaria Control and Elimination Partnership in Africa (MACEPA), have been working with the National Malaria Elimination Program district staff to overcome these numbers and improve the health of the local community by using geospatial technology to optimize indoor residual spraying (IRS) campaigns. Recently, the two organizations teamed up again to be the first to ever use Reveal’s spatial intelligence approach to maximize reach and ensure accountability in a mass drug administration (MDA) campaign that distributed antimalarials to the doorstep of each community member in three districts of Southern Province.

Lake Kariba’s still, glistening waters at sunset.

The recent history of malaria in Southern Province is one of resounding progress thus far. Due to its proximity to Lake Kariba’s glistening, still water, it is unfortunately a heavily malaria-burdened region by nature. But malaria in this region is highly seasonal, linked to the annual arrival of rainfall from December to April, leaving ample overgrowth and standing water—prime mosquito-breeding real estate. This seasonality provides an attractive window through which most interventions have taken aim. The result has been an impressive decrease in prevalence of malaria parasitaemia among children less than five years of age, from 15.5% in 2006, to 5.5% in 2010, and 0.0% in 2018.¹^,² Trends like these make Southern Province appealing as a prime candidate for malaria elimination. However, despite overall improvement in the province’s malaria burden at large, districts directly adjacent to the lake are still at higher risk, as malaria cases have shown to be persistently high in some health facilities despite ongoing interventions.

To propel Southern Province closer to elimination, in 2014 MACEPA supported the national program with a malaria MDA research study in the Southern Province districts lining Lake Kariba, an area with an estimated population of 300,000 people. The rapid malaria reduction in the study area resulted in Zambia adding MDA to its arsenal of interventions in 2017. The country’s experience of malaria MDA—two rounds with one month in between doses—has shown it to be an effective intervention in areas with a strong foundation of vector control, case management, and surveillance. Recognizing that MDA campaigns are most effective when every household and individual in the targeted region are reached, MACEPA engaged Akros for its technical expertise in introducing Reveal as a novel approach to maximize the impact of MDA for malaria control and elimination in this area.

Operationalizing spatial intelligence means saving lives

By Anna Winters on March 21, 2019 in Health Data Systems, Malaria, News

As a spatial epidemiology PhD student, I was drawn to questions about how the environment relates to and facilitates vector-borne disease (diseases that are spread by vectors like mosquitos). These questions and interests tend to lead spatial epidemiology graduate school students (like I was) straight into the land of building spatial models. We effectively try to understand how measures like wetness, greenness, and elevation may combine mathematically to tell us where high numbers of mosquitoes live. If those mosquitoes live near human hosts, or even animals, there may be greater risk of vector-borne diseases.

So, I too built a lot of maps and models during graduate school. I mapped the risk of West Nile virus (WNV) in Colorado, USA. At the time, WNV had, somewhat shockingly, erupted in that region of the US. I also modeled human plague in Uganda—effectively developing maps to precisely depict areas at high and low risk of plague transmission. “Target interventions where it’s red” was the more-or-less summary, where red equaled high-risk areas. Point made. Thesis closed. Safe on the shelf.

But here I sit on the other end of the world, far away from hallowed academic halls that are often lined with dead dissertations and theses like mine. Here in southern Africa, disease transmission is much more tangible. Before, I read about death rates due to malaria and HIV from my school in Colorado, US. Here, I witness the impact of those death rates every day when I drop my kids off at school—new graves being dug closer and closer to the road. I am involved with a local school that is inundated with orphans and vulnerable children—even from one of the more affluent regions of Zambia. In this environment, high morbidity and mortality rates are incessant. Help is highly dependent on securing increasingly limited resources. Navigating the challenging logistics of getting those resources to the right people at the right time and in the right place are often broken. However, despite the acute need to target limited resources, mapping approaches like the one I developed in school are rarely seen nor used to inform interventions.

It is time for the public health community—both globally and locally—to do business differently. It’s time to more appropriately lean on the idea of spatial intelligence through epidemiological and map-based approaches to inform the practice of intervention planning and delivery. Academic, math-based modeling can lend a good understanding of where and how we should focus our limited resources to save the most lives. “Why aren’t these approaches being actively used?” you might ask. Part of the challenge is a lack of tools and finite planning approaches to translate maps and models into operational, boots on the ground, public health programming decisions. Questions like, “Where are all the houses located?,” “Which houses exactly should receive the intervention based upon the model output?,” and “Has the intervention effectively reached everywhere it was targeted?” are challenging to assess, particularly in regions like here in southern Africa, where so many areas consist of rural villages with no addresses.

The Inside of Context is King

By Anna Winters on January 31, 2019 in Capacity Building, Health Data Systems, News

Akros is a bit different than most development NGOs. Instead of a large corporate office in a distant setting, Akros bases its team in Southern Africa. If we are solving problems in rural developing contexts, shouldn’t we be near enough to the challenges so we understand them? We have chosen to be close to the beneficiaries of our work to receive feedback, learn from what works and what doesn’t, and provide simple yet innovative solutions to the everyday problems that are faced. Since our goal is to provide support to communities and their governments and to transition lessons learned into sustainable programs, shouldn’t we work very closely with our government partners both in the office and in the rural communities we serve?

We think yes. And that’s driven our design.

At Akros, we bring innovative ideas for gathering and using data to solve development challenges through a “boots on the ground” approach. We’ve built our organizational culture and nuanced approach to implementation by being where our work is: in Southern Africa. Akros has been supporting government and partner counterparts from our headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia for over ten years. This close partnership has helped to contextualize our work and to ensure that we are only scaling ideas and approaches that are proven to make impact and be sustained in under-resourced settings.

It’s all about the maps

By Anna Winters on January 15, 2019 in Health Data Systems, News

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set out big goals and targets—and countries are making real progress in some cases. Under five mortality has reduced by 58% in under 20 years. New drugs and vaccines are continuously coming to market. Some diseases, like polio and guinea worm, are nearing elimination.

Even still, large gaps remain. Every day, 3,000 children die from malaria. About 100,000 children die from HIV-related causes each year. These are diseases that are entirely preventable and treatable. Malaria is controlled with mosquito bed nets, antimalarial treatment courses, and insecticides. Antiretroviral treatments are making it possible for people living with HIV to live a long, healthy life.

If solutions exist, then why do we continue to see such levels of morbidity and mortality in the developing world? Too often it comes down to a lack of the right tools in the right place and at the right time. In seventeen malaria endemic countries in Africa, for example, indoor residual spraying (IRS) is used at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars per year to kill mosquito vectors of malaria. In many cases, this tool is not achieving its full potential of reducing malaria, in part because it is not distributed to obtain a high enough true coverage. The World Health Organization tells us that IRS must be applied to at least 85% of a community in order to reach “true” coverage. Given the costs and the lack of enough resources to go around, the impact of this intervention sways further away from optimally saving lives from malaria.

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.

Component D was initially implemented in districts of Southern, Central, and Western Province, Zambia. Now multiple partners are supporting the rapid scale up of Component D across Zambia, improving malaria surveillance data, while also expanding access to care across the country. Thanks to PATH-MACEPA for this map.

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.

Prioritizing Interventions – Targeting IRS to Maximize Effectiveness

By Annie Martin on October 30, 2018 in Malaria, News

Malaria kills a staggering number of people every year — nearly half a million. That number is unacceptable given malaria is both preventable and treatable and somewhat surprising given donors and governments spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year attempting to control malaria.

So why is that number still so high? Well, first of all, malaria is primarily in countries with largely rural and hard to reach populations. Getting to those populations is logistically complicated and costly. Secondly, the mosquitos that transmit malaria quickly adapt to resist insecticides and to evade interventions. Thirdly, the scale of the problem is massive. While there are half a million deaths and over 200 million cases annually, the population at risk is even larger – half of the global population. Half of seven billion people are at risk for malaria.

With this context, hundreds of millions of dollars in control efforts begins to sound like a drop in the bucket. In order to make the most of the resources at hand, we must maximize the impact of each dollar spent. For example, interventions like indoor residual spraying (IRS) – where spray operators move household to household spraying the walls of homes with insecticide in order to kill the malaria transmitting mosquitoes – are very effective at killing mosquitoes and reducing malaria. However, IRS is expensive. We need to ensure we are distributing IRS resources in the most strategic and likely most impactful way.

In 2017, Akros worked with the Zambia National Malaria Elimination Centre (NMEC), the Africa Indoor Residual Spray (AIRS) Project implemented by Abt Associates, and the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) to conduct a comparison control trial of IRS prioritization strategies. The question was simple: If we do not have enough resources to spray every house, where should we spray to see the greatest decreases in malaria incidence? Should we spray one condensed geographic area? Should we spray the areas near the health centers with the highest burden of malaria? Or, should we spray the areas predicted to have the most mosquitoes? Each of these questions defined an arm of the study; one arm targeted IRS by concentrating it in one geographic area, one arm targeted IRS by prioritizing its delivery by health facility-measured malaria burden, and one arm targeted IRS by prioritizing its delivery by predicted mosquito density due to ecological factors. The NMEC implemented each arm in two districts of Eastern Province during the 2017 IRS operations.

Finding a village never before visited by IRS

By Ernest Mulenga on March 8, 2018 in Malaria, News

Background

The mSpray tool is more than just a mobile data collection tool that improves data quality and timeliness. The mSpray tool provides spray teams with maps to navigate to areas that might otherwise be difficult to find. These maps are highly accurate and complete, made through our satellite enumeration process. The district mop-up teams are especially reliant on these maps. Mop-up teams, are teams designated by the district with the specific task of revisiting areas that were not sprayed well during an initial visit or areas that were missed completely.

Unsurprisingly, mop-up teams help more areas reach the coverage goal of 90% sprayed and these teams visit some of the most remote villages, some of which have never been visited before. Ernest Mulenga, an Akros Surveillance Officer, documents the Chadiza’s mop-up team visit to a village; because the the team relies heavily on maps to navigate, they adopt vernacular of mapping and navigation, referring to the villages by the codes assigned to the “polygon” shapes appearing on the maps.

The search for polygon 01-455

It was the 9th of November 2017 when the mop-up team left Chadiza IRS base in search of Polygon 01-455 under Mtaya catchment area, which is located to eastern side of Chadiza district about 45 km from the district main post office.

Passing through Ngala area under Miti catchment, the team made a first stop at polygon 01-457 around 11:00 before proceeding to 01-455. The team used the GPS locator on the mSpray application, to navigate to a road that would lead to the village. Discovering the road to be impassable due to flooding from the heavy rain the team was re-directed by locals to a path that went through the mountain, and was said to be passable with a vehicle.

The Mtaya catchment area. The spray team was progressing through this area when they found polygon 01-455, which had never before been visited by a spray team.

The journey through the mountain started off well. After climbing some distance, however, the path became too filled with potholes for the Land Cruiser to continue. The team was left with no choice but to complete the journey on foot. At this point the team felt that they had covered a considerable distance with the Cruiser and that the polygon must not be far off. Thus, the team began to move with the aid of a GPS on the tablet. Once the direction of walking was set, the tablet was switched off for fear of using too much battery power.

USAID Awards Global Contract to PSI and Partners to Advance Malaria Service Delivery in 28 Countries

By Akros Media on February 26, 2018 in Malaria, News

We are excited to announce that PSI has been successfully awarded a new contract by USAID to support the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) to Advance the Progress of Malaria Service Delivery (APMSD) in 28 malaria-affected countries and selected Akros as an implementing partner. The project, worth over $160 million USD over five years, will be delivered by a consortium of core partners, led by PSI and including JHPIEGO, Medical Care Development International (MCDI) and University of California-San Francisco.

The project will focus on supporting national malaria control programs in USAID-supported Malaria Endemic countries including 25 in Africa and three in Asia. The interventions aim to improve quality of and access to malaria case management and malaria in pregnancy interventions. They will also improve quality of and access to other malaria drug-based approaches and provide support to pilot/scale-up newer malaria drug-based approaches. Global technical leadership, support for operational research, and advances in program learning are priorities as well. In addition to the core team, private sector partner Akros and University of Oslo and Medicines for Malaria Venture will support.

Akros will lean into its experience working with national ministries by leading efforts on strengthening capacity building of Ministries of Health (MoHs) for HMIS and executing a central strategic plan around data use within the MoHs and communities.

Globally, the world has made remarkable progress in controlling malaria; halving the burden of disease between 2000 and 2015, but progress is stalling. The WHO’s most recent World Malaria Report highlights the current state of case management of children under five years and delivery of intermittent presumptive treatment for pregnant women as major concerns.

The President’s Malaria Initiative, led by USAID and implemented with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the U.S. Government’s primary vehicle for assisting malaria affected countries to scale up proven malaria control and elimination interventions.

The PMI Strategy for 2015-2020 accounts for much progress over the past decade and offers a strategy for new and emerging challenges. Malaria prevention and control remains a major U.S. foreign assistance objective and PMI’s strategy fully aligns with the U.S. Government’s vision of ending preventable child and maternal deaths and protecting communities from infectious diseases. By working with PMI-supported countries and partners, the U.S. Government aims to further reduce malaria deaths and substantially decrease malaria morbidity, towards the long-term goal of elimination.

This new contract comes as PSI launches its new global strategy for consumer-powered healthcare. APMSD will innovate ways to bring healthcare closer to the consumer in developing countries. PSI is proud to be associated with USAID and its partners to achieve this goal.

ZANIS News covers latrine access in Pemba District

By Akros Media on January 12, 2018 in News, Water and Sanitation Health

Below is a video news report on the need for latrine coverage in areas of Zambia’s Pemba District. Akros staffer Annie Mutunda was on hand to help explain the necessity for such coverage.