Dimagi Projects Win Catalytic Grants for mHealth Innovation

Two of Dimagi’s mHealth projects, including Pathfinder’s CommCare project in Nigeria and JSI’s CommTrack project in Malawi, were awarded catalytic grants by the mHealth Alliance and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad.) A total of 10 grants were awarded to various organizations in Africa and Asia to scale mHealth projects focused on maternal and child health in developing countries.

From the mHealth Alliance’s announcement, the two projects include:

• m4Change – Pathfinder International will support Nigeria’s Saving One Million Lives initiative by using the grant to scale up the use of CommCare, a mobile phone decision support application, to improve the quality of maternal and child health services offered at primary health centers. Pathfinder will also provide technical assistance to the SURE-P project to integrate mobile money as an option for pregnant women to receive CCT payments, in order to increase the efficiency and security of transactions. Building upon the current m4Change pilot project, Pathfinder will implement CommCare in a total of 50 primary health centers in Abuja and Nasarawa, and will train 350 healthcare workers to use the mobile phone application. http://www.pathfind.org/

• Scaling up cStock in Malawi: Using data to improve access to medicines in the community – cStock, a system for reporting, managing, and monitoring all community-level health products (e.g., medicine), has been implemented by John Snow Inc., as part of the Enhanced Management (EM) approach in Malawi and has been endorsed by the Ministry of Health. The grant will be used to introduce the EM package to two districts and for developing a GPRS mobile application to support long-term reductions in costs and expansion of the system. http://www.jsi.com/JSIInternet/.