Catholic Relief Services

Texting with a Purpose: Catholic Relief Services in India

Posted by AnneryanHeatwole on May 19, 2010

Tagged With:

Read More >>

Texting with a Purpose: Catholic Relief Services in India data sheet 4645 Views

Catholic Relief Services' maternal and neo-natal health monitoring program in Uttar Pradesh, India is incorporating mobiles into its work. The pilot project, which launched in June 2009, uses mobiles to increase volunteers' ability to share and gather health information.

The program uses SMSs to allow ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists who are local volunteers) to report statistics on maternal and neo-natal health metrics. According to O.P. Singh, who gave a presentation on the program as part of the SHOPS/mHealh Alliance online conference, several problems in the current system led to the adoption of mobiles: the existing paper system was difficult to use, workers at village and block levels had limited access to information from headquarters, and the paper system was slow. The organization hoped that incorporating mobile phones would give the volunteers a better sense of the health landscape, since they would have access to real time information and be able to instantly share their results. During the presentation, Singh illustrated the system with the following graph:

Basic Information
Website URL: 
http://crs.org/
Organization involved in the project?: 
Catholic Relief Services
Project goals: 

The project's goals were:

  • To increase communication flow and collect data via community health workers
  • To teach local health workers to incorporate technology into their work
  • To more accurately track births and deaths

 

Brief description of the project: 

Catholic Relief Service's "Texting with a Purpose" gave mobile phones to community health workers (ASHAs) in the Uttar Pradesh region of India in order to track live births and deaths. The ASHAs filled out mobile forms and submitted them via SMS to a central database in order to better monitor maternal and neonatal health in the region. 

Target audience: 

The target audiences are:

  • 36 volunteer accredited social health activists
  • Pregnant women and newborns in Uttar Pradesh, India 

 

Detailed Information
Length of Project (in months) : 
10
Status: 
Ongoing
What worked well? : 

The project has raised the level of reported births to almost 100%. Because the data is compiled instantly, less children are missed than under the old system. The Catholic Relief Service has also seen that the ASHAs view the SMS system as a viable plan for the future or reporting on maternal/neonatal health and that they are working hard to master the system.

What did not work? What were the challenges?: 

So far, 65% of the ASHAs still need support from family members or the Catholic Relief Services staff in order to manage the SMS texting; reasons for this include a lack of familiarity with mobile technology and low literacy. Another challenge is the coded SMS system; it has to be filled out very precisely, which can lead to errors.