Time to Say Goodbye to Sokoto and Go Back to Abuja
I learned many lessons while following the vaccination campaign in Sokoto State. This was an amazing learning experience and I’m humbled by the great job done by our local partners and the international community that support this initiate.
Walking house to house and vaccinating children is very hard. We have a system of institutions that provide logistics and support, but all the real work I saw on the ground was done by local women that compose local Vaccinations Teams, since only they can enter people’s houses.
As Polio Data Manager, my role is to identify challenges starting from the local level. My main takeaway came from seeing the system of data collection at the grassroots. In Abuja, we only see summarized data in Excel tables. But here in Sokoto is where the magic starts, when a VCM (Volunteer Community Mobilizer) enters data manually into their paper register. This data is then summarized and sent via ODK (the Open Data Kit app) to the ONA database.
This system is working very efficient and definitely could reveal good practices for other programs. My focus now is on the register and how data is entered by the VCM’s in the field. There are two challenges to consider: how to design the register itself to make it easier to enter data and make it error-proof, and how to digitize data directly from the register, so we can emilite one of the error points and cross reference data coming directly from the filed not from summarized excel sheets.
Circumstances have forced us to reject the idea of electronic data entry at the local level. While this is technically feasible — we could deploy mobile phones to all 20,000 VCMs and train them to use these for data entry during future vaccination campaigns — it’s not operationally possible at this stage in many parts of Nigeria. Based on data from the Nigerian Communication Commission, most of the population already has access to mobile phones. However, many VCMs are not literate and need the support of a helper (usually their son or daughter) with filing data in the paper register.
Stay tuned for the next blog, where I will explore ideas how to design the register to make it error-proof and easier to use.
