It was recently announced that an initiative called Mobiles Against Malaria will be launched in Bamako, Mali. The initiative will be executed using mothers who are community health workers in an effort to use mobile phones to prevent, diagnose and treat malaria in a more effective way than it has been.

The project is being funded by Akvo, a foundation created in 2008 that uses open source web and mobile software to attract funders to a spread of projects being done in the developing world.

Mobile phones will be used by the mothers who were recruited as community health workers(CHW) to record data from neighborhoods on malaria. The CHW’s will visit each household in a particular neighborhood ready to ask pre-formulated questions.

The answers to the questions will be gathered on the mobile phones. For example, some of the questions asked may be ‘how many people live in the house’ and ‘how many people are ill’ and ‘what is the number of newborns’.

After gathering all of the necessary answers, the data will be sent via SMS to a central database located at a local hospital. It is hoped that NGO’s and local organizations will take advantage of the databases to analyze the trends and assist households in need of help. Officials hope the SMS data collection system will shed light on estimating how many insecticide-treated nets are needed in the poor areas in Bamako.

These community health workers will travel to malaria impacted areas around the capital city of Bamako to administer a revamped program. An older version was implemented using CHW’s who tested 2,796 children for malaria with a finger prick test after visiting nearly 100,000 households. That framework will be enriched by the introduction of the SMS-based frontline data collection.

The use of mothers as the CHW’s is a hallmark feature of this program. That along with using the SMS based frontline data collection sets this malaria detection program apart from other ones going on in Africa. Using mothers presents several advantages:

• mothers are trusted in the community
• they easily gain trust from other women from whom data is being collected
• they can persuade women to visit hospitals using that established trust
• they often have insider knowledge to the neighborhoods they work in
• they ensure use of treated mosquito nets
• they support treatment adherence

Along with attaining malaria specific data such as households using insecticide treated bednets, officials hope the program will create easier access to information on the burden. They also hope the cell phone-based application will improve patient management via a cell phone risk assessment and triaging tree, strengthen patient history documentation in the field, enable clinical communication (text, image, audio) between community health workers and clinics, and provide access to previously unrecorded health information.

The program aims to use mothers and cell phones to decrease costs of malaria detection and treatment while improving the access to treatment and treatment adherence. The program will train and utilize 50 CHW’s and 2 hospitals over the span of a year. It hopes that using mobile phones will build off of prior success.