Use of Smartphone Technology for Improved Quality of Reporting

The Core Group Partners’ Project (CGPP) is a USAID funded, multi-country, multi-partner initiative providing financial support and on-the-ground technical guidance to strengthen Nigeria’s efforts to eradicate polio and strengthen Routine Immunization (RI). In Nigeria, its partner organizations are Save the Children, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and International Medical Corp (IMC). In Nigeria CGPP is working in 5 states in a total of 25 LGAs in Northern Nigeria where transmission of the polio virus has remained a critical challenge to Nigeria’s goal of eradicating polio.

CGPP works through community volunteers who go from house-to-house conducting social mobilization activities and then generate data from these activities at the community level. However, the issue of data collection and quality reporting amongst these volunteers has consistently been a major problem under the Polio program. There were challenges related to ease of data collection, ease of data dissemination as well as ensuring data is available for use in a timely fashion. In order to address this challenge, CGPP Nigeria procured smartphones for use by its community level volunteers for data collection and dissemination. This significantly improved data collection and dissemination by eliminating cumbersome steps in the data flow chain and also making data available to a larger number of people in many places at the same time and in a timely fashion. This has also helped reduce the need to expose immunization staff of the project to risk in security compromised CGPP focal states of Borno and Yobe in Northeastern Nigeria where Boko Haram conduct recurrent attacks thus endangering the lives of CGPP staff .