Lwala Community Alliance in Kenya fights high rates of maternal mortality and HIV. Using a community-led health model and a custom CommCare-based mobile application, CHWs register each pregnant woman or child under five years old into the formal healthcare system. The application then walks the CHW through the proper workflows for vaccinations, family planning, disease diagnosis and treatment, or a number of other requested services.

CommCare allowed the implementing partner to do tiered targeting where they identified regions where coverage was lowest and held outreach events. CHWs would bring clients to a community venue, such as a school or church, and offered them the appropriate vaccines. For the remaining hold-outs, they targeted individual households to provide immunizations.

So far, the program has reached vaccination rates of over 96% across a population of 60,000 people. Prior to 2016 the coverage rate in the communities was in the low 60%, even though immunizations were available through hospitals.

Since July 2020, Dimagi has been working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Global Eradication Initiative (GPEI), and WHO to develop a CommCare based health workforce management system and support its roll out in multiple African countries for the 2020 polio vaccination campaign. The project will start in Cote D’Ivoire, before scaling to cover other countries.

The novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) is a vaccine against circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) that is authorized and available for use in eight initial target countries: Côte D’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Mali, and South Sudan.

A key challenge with running vaccination campaigns is that campaign workers are often uncertain about how much payment they are entitled to, the status of those payments, and how to access them. These administrative and logistical challenges have ripple effects that can ultimately impact the timeliness, rigor, and quality of implementation of the broader campaign.

The program’s goal is to stop polio outbreaks through conducting fast and good quality polio vaccination campaigns. The role of the technology will be to help streamline and accelerate some of the processes such as recruitment of workers and payments. By bringing transparency, clarity, and efficiency to the campaign with CommCare, the program hopes to increase vaccinators' clarity and engagement, thereby increasing the number of children vaccinated.