Health Systems Strengthening
Product or technological
Pilot
Urban
Most health managers in sub-Saharan Africa lack information on health service quality for decision making due to sub-optimal supervision of health services and lack of actionable data. This means managers are hard-pressed to know what challenges exist in which facilities at what time. While the outcome data (e.g. maternal deaths) is often available, there is no specific information available about certain challenges that contribute to these statistics e.g. non-functioning equipment or expired commodities at a particular facility. Resources are allocated without the benefit of correct information and this wastes time and money and affects service quality.
Dr Frida Njogu-Ndongwe is a medical doctor and public health specialist with experience in implementing HIV/TB and maternal, newborn and child health programmes. She is part of a team that conceptualised, designed and developed the Afyakit and is the current technical lead on the project. The Afyakit is a platform that can house digital supervision tools and provide analytics. Health managers co-create supervision tools to make them more comprehensive for extracting useful insights from supervision. The new tools are then digitized and placed on an Android platform for efficient use. The built-in analytics mean that, upon supervision, managers receive colour-coded dashboards that highlight problem areas which can then be aggregated at facility and administrative (e.g. sub-national) levels. These can be used to guide decision making as well as advocacy tools. Health facilities also receive detailed reports so they can act on identified areas for improvement. So far, the platform has been used in Nairobi with improvements in quality of services. The tools are modular and scalable and can be used in a wide array of health systems.