Meet the Team - Abdulkareem Iyamu

Meet Abdulkareem Iyamu, a Senior Coordinator with our Operations team at our Kano Campus in Nigeria!

Kareem, as he is fondly called, works with the Geo- Referenced Infrastructure and Demographic Data for Development (GRID3)  project that mapped 25 states in Nigeria plus the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). Currently, the project focuses on supporting states to use the geospatial data for informed decision making. The implementation of the project is mostly field-based and therefore, requires constant logistics support.

Kareem coordinates the operations side of the project. He makes sure people and resources are where they need to be at all times. He organizes travel plans, coordinates activities and event, and oversees the purchase and delivery of equipment. He ensures that the GRID3 project runs smoothly and often jokes that he could pass for the SCRUM master on the project.

Kareem joined eHA in 2017 and he has proved to be a valuable asset to his team and to eHealth Africa as a whole. He is well known and liked for his skills in organizing and is often drafted into various planning committees. He works hard to build relationships that are beneficial to the program and to eHA. Recently, he identified and helped eHA to win an opportunity for a household survey with Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) in Kaduna State, Nigeria.

In Kareem’s opinion, eHA is a platform where every skill is valued and can be honed.

“The GRID3 team and eHA as a whole, have done excellently. I am particularly proud of the fact that we successfully completed phase one of the GRID3 project, in record time. At the beginning of the project, it seemed like a herculean feat to map the whole country in 7 months but we did it.”

— Abdulkareem Iyamu

Are you passionate about operations and logistics? Click here to read more about career options at eHA.

Meet the Winners - #KadHack2018

Maaruf Dauda, Mercy Markus & Swam Didam Bobby - Team Egress

The Geo-Referenced Infrastructure and Demographic Data for Development (GRID3) project was born out of the successful mapping of 11 northern states during the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI).  Building on that, the GRID3 project scaled up to collect geospatial data and to map the remaining 25 states, plus FCT. Datasets relevant to Nigeria’s development needs across sectors such as health, education, environment, agriculture, urban planning, and investment promotion, were collected. Some of the data collected is currently being used in the health sector to support the planning and delivery of polio and routine immunization in Nigeria -  http://vts.eocng.org

To support governments, ministries, departments and agencies to identify use cases for the data collected in phase one of the GRID3 project in their states, eHealth Africa’s GRID3 team partnered with CoLab Innovation Hub, the Kaduna State Bureau of Statistics (KDBS), the  Kaduna State Budget and Planning Commission, the Kaduna State Government, and Kaduna ICTHub, to host a first of its kind hackathon, KadHack2018, in Kaduna State from November 27 - 29, 2018.

KadHack2018 was an opportunity for stakeholders in the technology sector to engage the Kaduna state government and gain firsthand insight into the challenges in the Education and Health sectors, in order to come up with software prototypes that could be further developed to solve problems within those sectors. The hackathon was split into 2 categories - a 3-day  on-site hackathon, and an online Hackathon for people outside the state.

The winners were announced today, meet Maaruf Dauda, Mercy Markus and Swam Didam Bobby who are Team Egress.  Their multifunctional “TrackIt” solution provides real-time mobile tracking, that can be used to track goods, vehicles and can also be used to report outbreaks using geo-coordinates. Congratulations to all the teams that participated!

To view more photos from the event, please click here.

World GIS Day 2018

World GIS Day is celebrated annually on November 14. The day provides a platform for stakeholders and users of geographic information to identify, create and demonstrate context-specific applications by which geospatial data can be used to transform our society.

This year, eHA’s GIS team focused on educating the next generation of prospective GIS data collectors, analysts and user— secondary school students in Governors’ College, Kano. The team enlightened the students on the power of geography and how GIS can be used to stimulate development. The team was also on hand to answer questions from the students.

Click through the slideshow to see how it went.

eHA staff with welcoming and innovative geography teachers at Governors' College, Kano

Students are wowed at the benefits of GIS

eHA staff, Kazeem, providing insights on GIS Day, benefits of GIS and how eHA has used GIS for health intervention especially around polio

The Head of Geography Department explaining maps to the students

A student identifying geographical features and landmarks on the Kano state Land-use map

eHA staff, Dennis, highlights the benefits of learning and using GIS technology at a young age. He also talked about eHA’s contribution to road mapping in Kano & Nigeria through the use of OpenStreetMap, which is available for free.

Cross-section of students after the GIS Day event

eHealth Africa: The Founders’ Story

Technology has the ability to transform and improve healthcare in Africa- this is the belief that eHealth Africa (eHA) was founded on.

eHealth Africa was conceived by Evelyn Castle and Adam Thompson, during their work placement at a Family Health Center in Kaduna state, Nigeria. They witnessed firsthand how overwhelming it was for the staff to track patient information and progress using paper-based methods.

Nearly a decade after, eHA has evolved into a health social enterprise that develops electronic health solutions using our expertise in logistics, geographic information systems, and technology. eHA is a team of over 500 people with country offices in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Germany, and the US; and operations across the region.

Watch this video to hear the tale straight from our founders.

You can also click here to read Evelyn’s blog about her inspiration to start eHealth Africa.

Meet The Team - Patricia Jangah

Meet Patricia Jangah, the Human Resources Manager in our Sierra Leone office!

Patricia joined the eHealth Africa (eHA) team over 2 years ago. She started working with eHA as Manager, Human Resources. She supports all projects at eHA in Sierra Leone.

Patricia maintains and enhances the organization's human resources by planning, implementing and evaluating employee relations and human resources policies, programs, and practices at all times for effectiveness and efficiency. In doing this, she sets up strategies to recruit, develop, retain and reward staff. She Supervises two staff and their department’s mantra is “give results not excuses”. She serves as a connection between the labor related government agencies and eHA in Sierra Leone.

One of Patricia’s greatest successes at #eHA was the development and roll out of the Sierra Leone employee handbook, the development and implementation of an engagement program, called “ Team of the Quarter”. Her department also prides itself on increasing the utilization rate of the HRIS - BambooHR and the attendance software (Swipeclock) by employees to 100% and introducing and maintaining a well structured onboarding program for new employees joining the eHA team in Sierra Leone.

Patricia has also been a vital contributor to the management of all staff related activities in eHA Sierra Leone. Her strength is in creating systems and procedures that make work seamless, and she has successfully done so for the HR team in the Sierra Leone office. She encourages staff development, coaching and mentoring of her supervisees. We are happy to have Patricia on board the eHealth Africa team.

Patricia is particularly proud about the fact that she has been able to put eHA’s HR systems and procedures for success and to create awareness in the organization around Sierra Leone’s labor policies and their  legal implications.

Would you like to be a part of our team? Click here to find out more.

eHealth Africa’s CornBOT wins Fall Armyworm Tech Prize for Frontier Innovation

Fall Armyworm (FAW) is a major farm pest capable of destroying 85 plant species including maize, sorghum, and tomato. Projections show that if FAW is not checked, sub- Saharan Africa could lose up to $13bn worth of food, keeping 300 million people in hunger.

In response to this, Feed the Future partnered with Land O’Lakes International Development and the Foundation for Food and Agriculture to launch the Fall Armyworm Tech Prize in March 2018. The prize sought for timely, context-specific entries that would enable smallholder farmers to identify, treat and track the incidence of Fall Armyworm in Africa.

CornBot mobile app

eHealth Africa partnered with Dr. Cornelius Adewale, the Bullitt Environmental Fellow at Washington State University (WSU), to develop CornBot, a mobile application equipped with audio-visual algorithms to enable farmers to identify, detect, prevent, manage and control FAW on their farms. The app is very user friendly as it is also available in the farmers’  local languages.

The application also provides handy information that allows the farmer to make requests for specialist’s help where needed. CornBot also has a dashboard that provides real-time information and a heat map for CornBot-reported FAW diagnosis and detection to researchers, decision makers and other stakeholders for surveillance purposes and informed decision making.

Fall Armyworm Tech Prize - Frontier Innovation award

Out of 225 applications from countries all over the world, CornBot scaled through four stages, including a user testing stage among smallholder farmers to ensure viability and effectiveness, and emerged as one of the 6 winners of the Fall Armyworm Tech Prize. At the AfricaCom Awards, eHealth Africa was presented with the Frontier Innovation award and was also awarded prize money of US $50,000.

About CornBot, the FAW Tech Prize panel had this to say, “CornBot had the highest testing score of all the solutions because the app’s interface was extremely easy to use and included a step by step FAW identification system for farmers. The solution is extremely comprehensive and accessible due to its use of human-centered design”

Through CornBot and our nutrition and food security systems focus area, eHealth Africa aims to develop data-driven, technological approaches to improving the quality and availability of nutritious food products throughout West Africa.

The Gender Gap in Public Health- Our Executive Director’s Perspective

Health care workers in Sierra Leone at an eIDSR training

The World Health Summit brings together stakeholders from health sectors and systems around the world to address pressing issues and chart a course for healthcare and medicine. On October 14-16, 2018, over 2,000 participants from countries all over the world converged at the World Health Summit in Berlin, Germany.

Our Executive Director, Evelyn Castle attended the summit and spoke on a panel discussing “Digital Integration of Surveillance and Outbreak Response Management”. She shared eHealth Africa’s experience leveraging digital surveillance tools such as Ebola Sense Follow-up and Electronic Integrated Disease Surveillance Response System (eIDSR) through an integrated data platform.

Watch her full presentation here

She was one of the only 102 women panelists who participated in the discussion. Some panels, in fact, had no women. This brought the issue of the gender gap in public health to the fore through a dedicated panel discussion tagged Addressing the Gender Dimensions for Health Systems Strengthening. She talks more about it on her Linkedin blog.

The World Health Organization estimates that over 70% of the global health workforce is made up of women but half of their contributions are unpaid or unacknowledged.

Community health mobilizers at Kawaji Primary Healthcare Center Kano state, Nigeria

Women bring a lot to the table not just as frontline health workers but as primary caregivers on whom the responsibility of executing the end stage of all health policies, strategies and programs fall. For example, policies on antenatal care or routine immunization will remain unexecuted if mothers do not bring their children to the health facilities. In addition, a female health worker is an essential asset to the health system, especially in communities where there are cultural or religious barriers prohibiting women from receiving care from male health workers.

The world’s ability to deliver quality health services to the populace lies in the strength of its workforce. Now more than ever, all hands, including women’s, must be on deck to ensure that the emerging challenges in public health, such as antimicrobial resistance, chronic and non-communicable diseases, are combated.

Thanks to the various perspectives offered by the panelists at the World Health Summit, it is believed that the first of many steps towards bridging the gender gap in public health has been taken.

Meet the Team - Iheanyichukwu Uzoma

Meet Iheanyichukwu Uzoma, an associate manager with our Geographic Information Systems (GIS) department.

He joined eHA as a Technical Project Manager seventeen months ago; currently, Iheanyi supports GIS tracking activities and analyzes polio vaccination coverage data for settlements in Borno and Yobe states. He also supervises operations for the Vaccinator Tracking Systems project .

One of his biggest achievements is the development of a Missed Settlement Tracking and Analysis (MISTA) Tool, which has been instrumental in identifying, naming and planning immunization campaigns for missed and previously unnamed settlements.

“On a daily basis, my team and I are able to resolve lingering issues with tracking and addressing missed settlements during Polio campaigns in security-challenged states like Borno and Yobe states. I am glad because I get to add value to my team and make a positive impact. By participating in these activities, I am also being impacted upon.”

— Iheanyichuwku Uzoma

Iheanyi is passionate about capacity building and development, not just for himself but for his colleagues. eHealth Africa, he says, has given him the opportunity to share his knowledge and skills with his team and with other staff across the organization. Iheanyi is very well known across eHA for his role in the rollout and adoption of the official project management methodology, Projects in Controlled Environments (PRINCE2), across the organization. His facilitation and coordination efforts contributed to a 93% success rate in the PRINCE2 Certification examinations taken by a number of eHA staff recently.

eLearning - The Journey so far

At eHealth Africa, one of our strategic objectives is to increase access to high-quality eLearning resources for healthcare workers to achieve proficiency in healthcare delivery, management, and leadership.

In line with this, eHealth Africa collaborated with the Kano State Primary Health Care Management Board (KSPHCMB) and other implementing partners, to deploy its eLearning solution on a pilot scale to health workers in Kano State. The eLearning platform is web and mobile-enabled and can be accessed by participants through their Kano Connect android phones.

Fifty- seven Ward Technical Officers (WTOs) and Health Facility In-charges (HFICs) from facilities across three local government areas of Kano state— Gabasawa, Nassarawa and Fagge LGAs—were selected and trained to utilize the eLearning platform. The aim was to improve the delivery of health services in Kano State by providing health workers with access to texts and audio courses and training modules.

Jibrin Mohammed, a Ward Technical Officer from Nassarawa LGA in Kano State shares his experience with the eLearning modules on routine immunization

After a pilot period of 3 months, the health workers who completed all the modules on the platform were awarded certificates of completion at an award ceremony on November 2, 2018. The ceremony was presided over by the Executive Secretary of Kano State Primary Health Care Management Board (KSPHCMB), Dr. Nasir Mahmoud. During the ceremony, selected participants shared their experiences with the platform and testified that they were better able to provide quality Routine Immunization (RI) services at their respective facilities because of the knowledge they had gained.

Following a successful pilot in Kano State, the RI content currently available on the platform is set to be scaled-up to 18 states in Nigeria, with an estimated number of 3000 health workers per state, to participate. Plans are also underway to expand the curriculum to include content on programs such as Cholera, HIV, Malaria, and Maternal and Child health.

Aether 1.0 and Gather 3.0 software releases are out!

Today eHA and the Aether team reached an important development milestone in their contribution to the ehealth open source community -- the release Aether 1.0 and Gather 3.0.

The belief that timely access to accurate data can save lives drives our commitment to create open source software for the development and sustainability of ehealth solutions. We believe that by facilitating the collection, curation, and exchange of relevant health data, we empower decision makers and improve the effectiveness of public health interventions.

With this in mind, last year we started working on Aether, an ambitious project to create a framework for the development of ehealth solutions. We wanted to build a platform that could facilitate developers' work and ensure that ehealth products were built with the highest standards for interoperability, security, and privacy.

OPEN SOURCE RELEASE

We started transforming that vision into a concrete product in September 2017, and in July the following year, we celebrated the open source release of both Aether and Gather.

Aether is a reliable and secure development platform that enables organizations to build solutions that curate and exchange live information. Aether utilizes “data contracts” between systems, simplifies the movement of data between applications, and helps developers adhere to best practices for ehealth system design.

Gather is the first solution built on top of the Aether platform. Gather is a data collection and curation tool that securely collects data in the field and shares it everywhere it is needed. Thanks to Aether, Gather can perform data curation activities like data masking for privacy requirements and can easily be integrated with other systems and workflows for management, transformation, and analysis purposes.

We were committed to making these projects open source both as a way to give back to the public health community we have been active in for years and so that feedback could be used to quickly improve the solutions. Since their development and release, Aether and Gather have been used by eHA and our partners in a variety of projects.

DEPLOYMENTS

Understanding malaria awareness and practices among young people in Sierra Leone

In July 2018, we partnered with Restless Development and CUAMM Africa in Sierra Leone to provide data collection infrastructure for a malaria prevention campaign called "Youth-Led Malaria Prevention Messaging Survey".
The campaign aims to help public health authorities understand young people’s knowledge, attitude, and behavior towards malaria prevention and treatment. We use Gather for data collection and Aether to connect to a Kibana Dashboard for data analysis visualization. So far, 2,417 survey responses have been submitted.

Building a global high-quality humanitarian health facility database

In July 2018, we were awarded funding for a collaborative global health site mapping project with Healthsites.io. The objective of the initiative is to create a high-quality database that includes information on facility locations, medical staff, and services, which can be used to improve humanitarian crisis response. Data collectors will use Gather in the field to capture health facility data, which will then be connected and shared via Aether to Healthsite.io, Open Street Map, and Humanitarian Data Exchange.

Collecting geodata to gain insight into Nigeria and DRC Health and Demographics

In August 2018 we started implementing Aether and Gather in Kaduna State as part of the the GRID3 project, a multi-country initiative to support underserved communities by collecting and analyzing on points of interest such as settlements, roads, and hospitals. The geodata collected through Gather is automatically published via Aether to a publicly available, customized CKAN instance. As of October 12, 2018, 513,084 points of interest have been submitted through Gather.
Since August, eHA’s involvement in the GRID3 project has expanded into multiple states in Nigeria and to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). For its use in the DRC, we customized Gather in partnership with UCLA, CIESIN, Oak Ridge and Flowminder. The GatherDRC mobile app was built specifically for microcensus and other mapping tasks.

THE RELEASE AND NEXT STEPS

You can now download Aether 1.0 and Gather 3.0 and start using the software yourself.

Though this is an important milestone in our development process, it is only the beginning of a much longer journey. Currently, we are working toward the development of new features that will allow multi-tenancy, data validation rules, and workflows. In addition, connectors for other ehealth applications will be added, including:

BPMN: Integrate with Workflow processes and tools like Camunda

Zapier: Participate in data exchange with 100’s of existing Apps

DHIS2: Bi-Directional data exchange with DHIS2 API

FHIR: Bi-Directional data exchange via FHIR standard

We look forward to hearing your feedback on our products and hearing from interested organizations and potential partner that are interested in using Aether and Gather for the global good.

Get in touch with us at solutions@ehealthafrica.org