The Home Visits
Female home visitors go to every household in their catchment of about 300 households. They register all pregnant women, and revisit them every two months during their pregnancy.
In each visit, they note the woman’s answers to questions about her health on a cellular handset, sending the record to a central server, and then they share and discuss video-clips about the pregnancy risks.
Male home visitors speak with the partners of these pregnant women every two months to share the same information with them and to discuss the videos.
The role of technology
The home visits program uses GPS-enabled android handsets.
Female and male visitors record responses to questions about the household status, knowledge and attitudes about maternal and child health, and maternal and child health outcomes, and send the records to a central server, from where they can be downloaded for analysis. The handsets include guidance for the fieldworker about when to refer a woman with danger signs to a health facility.
The visitors use the same handsets to show video clips about risks to maternal and child health that women and their spouses can tackle together.
The handsets also allow remote monitoring of the work of the home visitors. Records of interviews carried out in the wrong location, with inadequate interaction time, or with labelling errors, cannot be sent to the server.
