Authors: Christopher Isah, Alhassan Bulama, Segun E. Ibitoye, Foluwakemi M. Ogunkua, Beatrice Syomiti, Isaiah Nyabuto
Background: The Nigerian healthcare sector experiences several limitations in collating and reporting accurate and comprehensive data on demand generation activities for healthcare services, especially in rural communities. Furthermore, the Nigerian health system lacks an effective, efficient and centralized national or regional system to document, manage and report data for community demand generation and mobilization activities for family planning.
The Adolescents 360 program in Nigeria aims to increase the voluntary access and use of modern contraception among sexually active girls aged 15-19. Utilizing human-centred design, developmental science, and social marketing, this is being implemented through a client-centered, community-based strategy known as “Matasa Matan Arewa (MMA)” for young married girls in Northen Nigeria. Male Interpersonal Communication Agents (MIPCAs) go into the communities to counsel husband on need to allow their wives access family planning services.
DHIS2 intervention: The A360 project designed the DHIS2 Event Capture application module to document, manage and report community mobilization activities for family planning program.
Using mobile devices, trained MIPCAs utilize the application to document number of husband reached with demand generation / awareness messages. The husbandsare then issued with referral cards to health facility.
The facility provider documents sources of information and referrals for all clients, thus establishing link between community mobilization and service uptake. The ability to triangulate this data effectively helps to ascertain the value of community awareness and mobilization engagement. Also, the DHIS2 Event data enables the MIPCA to follow up on referred husbands whose spouses are yet to access services at the health facilities after being issued referral cards.
Results: Between 2021 and 2023, 579 MIPCA were trained on community mobilization, and male partner engagement for family planning. A total of 452,634 husbands were reached and engaged with family planning messages, 219,488 referral cards were issued to the men to give their wives as referrals to health facilities, and 114,120 of these clients were counseled by Providers for family planning.
Program Implications: Improved data collection quality: the module enables community health workers to collect accurate and timely data in real time, simplifying the data collection process and reducing the time lag between data collection, analysis, and reporting.
Enhances program planning and decision-making; the module allows for easy data aggregation and systematic analysis and is visualized in a way that enables better decision-making at the community, local, and national levels.
Conclusion:
DHIS2 to improve Demand Generation for ASRH & FP among young women in Northern Nigeria.pdf (811.9 KB)
Keywords: Demand generation, Adolescents, Family Planning, and male engagement
1 post - 1 participant