CapacityPlus Explores Mobile Health Strategies for Performance Support

The Tanzania Human Resource Capacity Project—a Capacity Project Associate Award—is supporting parasocial workers, a new cadre of community social worker serving the country’s most vulnerable children. To bolster this support, CapacityPlus is examining ways to use mobile phone technology as a tool for supportive supervision.

CapacityPlus's Angela Self visited D-Tree International’s program to learn about its application of a low-cost tool used by community health workers to transmit data from maternal and child health-related activities via mobile phones.

District visits and interviews with staff from the Tanzania Department of Social Welfare and the Tanzania Human Resource Capacity Project as well as parasocial workers, their supervisors, community health workers, and social welfare officers provided the context, challenges, and opportunities within which a mobile health strategy would operate.

CapacityPlus is conducting a detailed review of the trip findings to determine the feasibility of developing a mobile health application to support the performance of parasocial workers.

Photo: Prosper Msuya