Pre-Conference

Hackathon to develop Family Planning technological solutions

TANZANIA has set a 72 hour fast-paced event dubbed Hackathon Challenge that bring together a multi-disciplinary team of technology, business and family planning experts to develop technological solutions to the pressing challenges facing family planning programs.

The event hosted by the National Family Planning Conference organizers in collaboration with Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH), KINU Innovation Hub and the University of Dar es Salaam through its Business School (UDBS) along with its Entrepreneurship Centre (UDEC) and the mHealth Alliance.

Hackathon develops ICT based tools to assist in improving service provision and information sharing between stakeholders work with women of reproductive age. Business experts advise the teams on sustainability plans for their generated solutions.

For the first ever, the conference organizers together with the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare and other various Family Planning stakeholders, host the 2013 Family Planning Hackathon. Business experts offer advice to the teams on sustainability plans for their generated solutions.

The Hackathon Challenge winner will receive USD 1,000 award in an Innovation Lab Winners Showcase and Award Ceremony to be held on October 11 after a weeklong, whereby invitees present team formation and challenge assignment. The teams develop viable and scalable technological solution to the assigned challenges before presenting their solution to a panel of judges on October 5 this year.

One team problem statement seeks to address supply and demand side challenges facing FP programs through an integrated mHealth service.  On the demand side, Mobile for Reproductive Health (m4RH) is an opt-in, interactive, menu-based text message system that provides automated information about nine FP methods for free in Tanzania. 

On the supply side, the ILS Gateway, is a mobile health alert and reporting system that collects logistics data from health facility personnel via SMS and displays it on a website for review and decision-making by upper-level management. 

That problem challenges teams to incentivize m4RH users to go to clinics and adopt FP methods by enabling users to learn which clinics have specific FP methods (via a link to ILS Gateway) and to acquire methods at identified clinics for subsidized prices via an e-voucher.

Team two problem statements seeks to address the significant need for accurate and accessible sexual and reproductive health (SRH) information among young people in Tanzania.

Tanzania Demographic and Health Survey 2010 (TDHS), reveals that of all age categories, 15-19 year-old adolescents are the least exposed to family planning messages 35.4%, women; 30.9%, men.

Furthermore, a significant proportion of young females in this age category who are not using practicing family planning have never discussed family planning with a health provider.

Leveraging the growing use of mobile phones among young people, teams are challenged to take existing, evidence-based SRH content and develop an educational and entertaining game application (“app”) for basic phones that will provide young people with the information they need to live healthy, empowered lives.

The third problem statement seeks to address a current challenge experienced with a decision support application programmed in feature phones and used by community health workers to provide family planning counseling and services.

That application utilizes GPRS to allow for the collection and reporting of data that will help to monitor service provision. Furthermore, it also utilizes SMS to send automated reminders to both CHWs and supervisors on weekly and monthly reports on service provision.

The e-FP has several technological advantages including skip patterns, auto-data capture, real-time access to data, real-time data access, and portability. However, the data collected from the phone is sent directly to the central server, bypassing the facilities and district level, where supervisors of the community health workers are based.

The supervisors currently receive aggregate data via SMS. The teams will be challenged to develop a complimentary application that will allow supervisors at facility and district levels to query data collected from the application and generate different types of customized reports.