Caminos
Verified · Jan 20151 min read
● projectDiscontinued · local · 2009

ChildCount+ in Sauri (Millennium Villages Project)

SMS-based mHealth tool (built on RapidSMS, open source, GPL license) piloted since 2009 in Sauri, Siaya County, within the Earth Institute's (Columbia) Millennium Villages Project: community health workers registered by text the status of every child under 5 and pregnant woman (CMAM malnutrition, malaria, immunization, pregnancy monitoring and antenatal appointments), with automatic alerts and reminders. Handsets provided by Sony Ericsson (2009) and a toll-free number with Airtel Kenya. It ended with the closure of the MVP in 2015; the village was not prepared to sustain operations independently.

Empty hospital bed in a bare ward roomillustrative atlas image · Adhy Savala / Unsplash
MVMillennium Villages Project / Earth Institute, Columbia UniversityuniversityMBMatt BergASAndrew S. Kanter
Part of this project? Claim your place

01 How it works

method · CMAM (community-based management of acute malnutrition) supported by SMSmethod · Maternal and child health registration and monitoring via SMS by CHWstool · RapidSMS (open source framework, GPL)tool · ChildCount+

02 What it stands on

Evidence level
Own experience
Grounded in published theory
Documented evidence elsewhere
Independently evaluated here
Peer-reviewed research documents this project: the strongest evidence level in the atlas.
The evidence 2 ›
ContextSauri Millennium Village (artículo con historia, cierre 2015 y críticas documentadas)Wikipedia · 2024
EvidenceThe importance of using open source technologies and common standards for interoperability within eHealth: Perspectives from the Millennium Villages ProjectAdvances in Health Care Management, 12:189-204 (Kanter AS, Borland R, Barasa M, et al.) · 2012

03 Lessons learned

1) Funding tied to the project cycle killed the tool: without a plan to transfer it to the public system, digital infrastructure dies with the donor (the MVP concluded in 2015 and the village 'was not prepared to continue operations independently'). 2) The team itself (Kanter et al. 2012) emphasized open standards and interoperability as a condition for replication. 3) The top-down approach with weak community consultation ('lacks consultation and a feedback loop', 'one-size-fits-all solutions to poverty') limited learning and sustainability. Direct contrast with eCHIS: same country, same function, but with government ownership from the design stage.