Blog

It has been another busy few months for the mCHW project team. The successful scale up in November and December of the project to 100 community health volunteers and their supervisors in Kibera and Makueni with ongoing refresher trainings, was followed by an inspiring Capacity Building trip by Amref Health Africa collaborators Dr Alice Lakati…

By Benson Maina Njoroge, Public Health Officer and Supervisor in Kibera, Nairobi I was privileged to attend yet another one of the First Love Mothers group meetings held on Sunday 8th Feb 2015. This followed an invitation from the Chairlady of the group Ms Judy. I arrived early in Kibera where the meeting was to…

By Benson Maina Njoroge, Public Health Officer and Supervisor in Kibera, Nairobi I have always believed that an open mind can add more meaning and can catch on details that may otherwise slip through our fingers. Since the introduction of the project, Amref Health Africa, the Ministry of Health through the Community Strategy and the…

By Rhoda M. Makato, Community Strategy Focal Person, Kilome sub-County The mCHW project is a mobile intervention that has overcome geographical constraints and provide innovative practice-based tools for training Community Health Volunteers (CHVs). The program has facilitated increased communication and support between CHVs and their supervisors, Community Health Extension Workers (CHEWs). In Makueni the Referral…

Niall discusses the main findings of his contribution to the HEART Topic Guide on educational technology in developing countries, which was launched on 13 November 2014. The guide offers recommendations to support UK Department for International Development (DFID) advisers on how to strengthen the design, implementation and evaluation of edtech programmes. For more information, see: http://www.heart-resources.org/mmedia/niall-winters-education-technology/…

We’re very glad to welcome Hannah Wanjiru to the project, who has joined us as a researcher on the mCHW project based at Amref Health Africa. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology and Communication from the University of Nairobi. Prior to joining the project, Hannah worked with the AMREF Kenya as a…

One of the many paradoxes of 21st century medicine is the growing inequality of health care outcome. While recently published data by the International Comparison Program (ICP) has suggested that the global economic inequality has fallen sharply over the past few years, and economic growth has helped emerging economies to ‘catch up’ with the developed…

Our teams in Kibera and Makueni County are continuing their use of our REFER mobile web app. We’ve been looking at how it is used in practice by community health workers and their supervisors, known as CHEWs. I like this quote from one of the CHWs, which captures the idea nicely in her own words:…

It has been a busy week for the mCHW team, organizing and leading a breakfast panel and presenting findings from our interim project evaluation at the 2014 GETHealth Summit in Dublin, as well as at the Web 2.0 conference in Bilbao. It has been a great experience and has led to fruitful discussions around the…

[caption id="attachment_2406" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Mr. Benson visiting with a household in Makueni[/caption]   In my experience as a CHEW in Kibera I have found it very interesting to use technology to communicate with the community, the CHVs and my supervisor. The package on monitoring developmental milestones in children 0-59 months (under 5) has proved to…