Cambridge, MA, November, 2024 – The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) program has awarded Dimagi a grant to scale and evaluate its innovative CommCare Connect (CCC) platform. This partnership aims to address the declining and inequitable coverage of child health interventions, including Vitamin A supplementation and Oral Rehydration Solutions (ORS) with zinc, which are crucial for reducing child mortality in underserved communities.
The CCC platform will enable locally-led organizations (LLOs) and Frontline Workers (FLWs) to opt into additional paid, purposeful delivery of Child Health Campaign (CHC) activities, focusing on door-to-door delivery of health interventions to children under five years old. This project will span several high-need regions in northern Nigeria, where child health intervention coverage is critically low.
Read more on this project at USAID DIV website here.
Project Highlights:
- Addressing Critical Needs: Vitamin A deficiency is a leading cause of child blindness and mortality, while diarrhea remains a major cause of death among children under five. Despite being inexpensive and easy to administer, these interventions are not reaching many children in need, particularly in the poorest and hardest-to-reach communities.
- CommCare Connect (CCC) Platform: Building on the success of the CommCare platform, CCC will allow LLOs and FLWs to deliver health interventions more effectively. The platform includes decision support, data capture, and GPS verification to ensure accountability and effectiveness.
- Pay-for-Performance Model: Dimagi will establish contracts with LLOs to deliver the Child Health Campaign, cost effectively.
- Target Population: The project will focus on children under five in Northern Nigeria where health interventions are most cost-effective. This includes areas with high child mortality and low Vitamin A supplementation and ORS usage rates.
- Evidence Building: Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) will conduct a randomized-controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of the CCC platform. This study aims to determine whether CCC-CHC increases coverage of Vitamin A and ORS, particularly among the most vulnerable children, compared with existing approaches.
Jonathan Jackson, CEO of Dimagi, stated, “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.”
About CommCare Connect
Dimagi is committed to expanding upon our historical strength by deepening our commitment to Frontline Workers and by actively contributing to the improvement of their jobs through a new platform called CommCare Connect. With CommCare Connect, we are hoping to explore ways to better enable Frontline Workers to learn new skills, better deliver services, and support payments for those verified services, leveraging CommCare.
About USAID DIV
Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) provides grant funding to innovators and researchers to test new ideas, take strategic risks, build evidence of what works, and advance the best solutions. DIV’s evidence-based, tiered-funding model embraces risk at early stages and mitigates risk at later stages, ensuring that funding is targeted to the most cost-effective innovations that can improve people’s lives. DIV takes a broad approach to innovation; innovations can be business models, products, behavioral interventions, applied research, or replications of proven innovations in novel environments. Please visit the USAID DIV website to learn more.
About Dimagi
Dimagi is a global social enterprise that powers impactful frontline work through scalable digital solutions and services. Since 2002, Dimagi has been guided by a vision of a world where everyone has access to the services they need to thrive. Dimagi is most well-known as the makers of CommCare, the most widely-deployed digital platform for enabling Frontline Workers. Governments and organizations across all sectors use customized mobile, web and SMS applications built on CommCare to deliver services at the frontline. Dimagi is a certified Benefit Corporation with teams in the United States, India, South Africa, Senegal and around the world. Please visit Dimagi’s website to learn more.
