Development Innovation Ventures and Dimagi Partner to Enhance Child Health Interventions in Northern Nigeria

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) program has awarded Dimagi a grant to scale and evaluate CommCare Connect, addressing the declining and inequitable coverage of child health interventions, including Vitamin A supplementation and Oral Rehydration Solutions with zinc, that are crucial for reducing child mortality in underserved communities.

Spanning several high-need regions of northern Nigeria, where child health coverage is critically low, the project will let locally-led organizations and frontline workers opt into additional paid, purposeful delivery of door-to-door Child Health Campaign activities for children under five.

The challenge

Vitamin A deficiency is a leading cause of child blindness and mortality, and diarrhea remains a major cause of death among children under five. Despite being inexpensive and easy to administer, these interventions still don’t reach many children in the poorest, hardest-to-reach communities.

How CommCare Connect helps

Building on the CommCare platform, CommCare Connect adds decision support, data capture, and GPS verification to ensure accountability, and a pay-for-performance model in which Dimagi contracts with locally-led organizations to deliver the Child Health Campaign cost-effectively.

“We are excited to partner with USAID DIV to scale our CommCare Connect platform. This funding will enable us to deliver life-saving health interventions to millions of children, ensuring that even the most marginalized communities have access to essential health services, while improving frontline worker jobs to ensure long term progress for community based health care delivery.”

Jonathan Jackson, CEO, Dimagi

Building the evidence

Innovations for Poverty Action will conduct a randomized controlled trial to evaluate whether CommCare Connect increases coverage of Vitamin A and ORS, particularly among the most vulnerable children, compared with existing approaches. Read more about the project on the USAID DIV website.