All Projects

Mobile mapping for women’s health

Simavi

“Evidence-based advocacy stimulates systemic institutional change and real action to challenge the discrimination women face in Tanzania.” — Jenni Sawyer, Simavi

554

is the Maternal Mortality Ratio per 100,000 live births

Less than 42%

of rural women in Tanzania deliver in a health facility

Start date
December 2015
End date
March 2017
Period: 15 months

Issue

Health service provision in Tanzania, specifically for women’s sexual and reproductive health (SRH) needs and rights, remains poor. While the government has had significant success in lowering infant mortality rates, deaths among mothers is dropping much more slowly, and women in rural and marginalised communities still struggle to access essential healthcare facilities.

As part of a substantial commitment by the government to improve its basic services - including the aim of lowering maternal mortality rates by a third - service delivery has been devolved to Tanzania's Local Government Authorities (LGAs) who are responsible for planning, budgeting and delivery of health services.

But, to help support this new responsibility, old, paper-based systems need to be updated, and local government need to have solid information on which to base their decisions.

Project

Mobile Mapping for Women’s Health is working with rural communities, digitally mapping the availability, accessibility and quality of health services through an app.

The tool will combine patient satisfaction surveys, community scoring cards and service quality assessments to gather information that is critical for making life-saving services work.

This data will be linked to GPS references of health facilities and displayed on a map to give a clear picture of where the data was collected. The team aims to create clear and compelling evidence that local government uses to plan services around SRH, and that citizens and CSOs can use to make sure quality services are actually being delivered.

 

 

Partner

Simavi is an international NGO that realises projects driven by community-based demands to ensure basic health for all. To achieve the goal of basic health, Simavi invests in sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and water, sanitation, hygiene (WASH). Simavi implements SRHR programmes on safe motherhood, behaviour change and sexual and reproductive health services, using knowledge of local values to create context relevant interventions.