The organization
In Somalia the International Rescue Committee (IRC) mapped locations of clients for an immunization and family planning project, ensuring that women and children received timely follow-up care.
The challenge
In Somalia, where severe drought exacerbates already poor living conditions, people migrate towards Mogadishu, the country’s capital, which has one of the highest urban population densities in the world. About 600,000 displaced people live in the city’s informal settlements.
Without organized government and security, the country’s population is at the low extreme of global rankings for child and reproductive health. In addition, immunization coverage is extremely low, since only a fraction of the population can access existing health services.
How they did it
The project worked with health workers serving communities across five Mogadishu health facilities to test the feasibility of using a tracing application that helps healthcare workers identify and follow up on people who miss healthcare appointments—in tandem with Plus Codes to locate and map clients for referrals.
The key challenge faced by the project was finding children who were due for a follow-up check up. The Plus Codes technology platform gave a mappable address for each family that was easily shareable and could even be written down as needed. Over the course of the program they integrated Plus Codes with the field app and worked together with the project managers to take advantage of the Plus Codes.
- Led mapping exercises to register mothers and children in the app to estimate targets and facilitate follow-up visits
- Captured GPS coordinates of locations for each registered child and mother, and converted these coordinates into Plus Codes—replacing lengthy and hard-to-remember GPS coordinates.
- Created auto-generated lists with defaulters and their associated Plus Codes.
- Generated paper maps using Plus Codes for healthcare workers without phones so that they could trace defaulters and estimate clients covered
- Helped healthcare workers with phones enter Plus Codes into map applications to locate defaulters.
- Conducted monthly family planning and immunization outreach activities to increase awareness of and demand for services.
The impact
During this project, thousands of children were vaccinated and hundreds of mothers adopted a family planning method. The application with integrated Plus Code technology enabled healthcare workers to identify and vaccinate ~88 percent of immunization-defaulted children.