A CommCare Certification Surprise on WhatsApp

At Dimagi, it feels like we use a million different systems to stay connected at work. Outside of the office, our Boston-based team also stays connected on a Dimagi WhatsApp chat. Folks will ping the chat with happy birthday wishes, share invites for people to join their after work or weekend plans, or share photos of their most recent field trips or vacations.

This morning, I woke up to the following WhatsApp message from one of our Project Managers, Andrea Fletcher. As part of our work through USAID’s Fighting Ebola Grand Challenges, Andrea is currently in Sierra Leone with our Deputy Director of Global Services Courtney Kelly. They’re spending time helping numerous organizations in Sierra Leone scope, build, deploy, and improve CommCare applications for their Ebola response work.

What Andrea unexpectedly ran into in the middle of Sierra Leone was three smiling project managers from Partners in Health,  all of whom had recently taken the online “CommCare fundamentals” class. Through CommCare Certification, anyone can enroll in Dimagi Academy online courses. Participants can take different free courses focus on different aspects of CommCare, from CommCare fundamentals to application building to project coordination. Once participants pass all of the tests associated with a learning track and complete a capstone exercise, they become officially certified in CommCare, meaning that they have demonstrated a high level of competency and experience in using the system.

Later in the morning, Andrea sent out the following message with an update of what she experienced during her visit with Partners in Health:

“What I’m seeing here with CommCare Certification is that it helps people help themselves. During past field visits, I used to spend a lot of time just teaching partners what CommCare was and basic concepts about CommCare. But now that people are going through the CommCare certification courses, the conversations I’m having are drastically different. I’m no longer just helping people set up CommCare accounts and create logins; we’re having discussions about app workflows and user management.  And instead of spending hours trying to convey why case management is important, we’re working together to create advanced configurations like sub-cases or parent/child relationships.  

Showing up to Partners in Health and seeing their staff already taking the initiative to learn about CommCare and build applications made our time together more useful for everyone.”

It’s always awesome to get messages like this from our team in the field, especially on a Monday morning. It’s even more awesome to see how excited these three men were in showing that they passed CommCare fundamentals course, so much so that they took the time to laminate their certificates. They also suggested we form a LinkedIn group for people that go through the CommCare certification process, so expect to see that coming soon!

Want to learn more about getting CommCare certified? Click the link below and someone from our team will reach out to you!