mHealth

The Ministry of Health, with technical support from the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO), implemented a project from 2010 to 2013 to boost the reduction of maternal, neonatal and child mortality in the Northern and North Central Regions, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The project consisted of six intervention areas, the main one being community IMCI. This allows community health workers (CHWs) to treat, screen or refer children aged 0-5 years for the most deadly diseases such as malaria, pneumonia, diarrhoea and malnutrition at home.

An evaluation of the process of implementing community IMCI and the quality of services provided by CHWs was conducted in 2013, and highlighted the ability of most CHWs to correctly classify and treat these childhood conditions.

However, many challenges remained, including the poor availability and quality of case management data, very frequent drug shortages and inadequate supervision of CHWs. It is within this framework that a project has been initiated to set up an information system which will overcome these difficulties.

The project aims to improve the completeness, accuracy and precision of the data transmitted, the speed of data transmission, the monitoring of IMCI management activities, decision-making, as well as the monitoring of health product stocks among community health workers.

The added value of this solution lies mainly in taking into account the difficulties concerning poor internet coverage in Burkina Faso, the optimal integration of the solution into the structuring and organisation of the National Health Information System (NHIS), the interoperability of its applications, as well as with the SNIS computerised systems (e.g. the National Health Data Warehouse of Burkina Faso), and finally the attractiveness of the solution to the beneficiaries because of their involvement and the fact that their concerns/needs are taken into account throughout the implementation of the project.