2017 ICT4D Conference

ACCESS-SMC is a UNITAID funded project led by Malaria Consortium in partnership with Catholic Relief Services, which aims at scaling up seasonal malaria chemo-prevention (SMC) in the Sahel to children under five. The project is implemented in collaboration with the Ministries of Health in Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and the Gambia. During its life it will have provided approximately 45 million treatments to about 7 million children in these seven Sahelian countries. CRS supports the implementation of SMC in 4 of theses countries: Guinea, Mali, Niger and The Gambia where we have with the support of technical partners built an ICT4D enabled accountability framework based on the following principles:
 Coverage: Registration of beneficiaries
 Efficacy: Case Control Study
 Effectiveness: Post distribution survey to explore issues such as adherence and confirmation of coverage
 Resistance: Filter papers collected for PCR for resistance markers
 Safety: register details minor and series adverse effects.
 Acceptability: community dialogues and HH/ CHW surveys post distribution

Lessons to be explored include: To support transparent data use and inform quick decision making to improve implementation activities during SMC campaign days, the use of electronic data collection tools has the potential to simplify visualisation and support supervision and response activities on “quasi real time basis”. On a low cost device per district to capture the one page daily summary data would be a potential valuable tool to facilitate this process. This needs to be explored within the context of the DHIS2 rollout at district and health facility level to ensure integration of systems and the long term possibility of producing SMC dashboards within DHIS2. When approaching transition of SMC platforms and looking at the sustainability of SMC data management systems at country level it is pertinent to explore ways of integration of SMC data into existing information management systems such as DHIS.