Benin HCMS (Health Campaign Management System) is built to manage a series of health campaigns over the same population data in one single platform. This allows the project team to track households who participate in different health projects easily and see the data for campaigns repeated over a number of years. Our Android application is customized for this type of project to allow field teams to track essential assistance data, such as creating or updating households or issuing their medicines. The population data is available in the devices, and it works offline.

The solution is currently used by the Health Team at CRS Benin. There are multiple stakeholders involved, each which have different levels of access based on their need. One of the most important stakeholders is the Government of Benin which needs to receive up to date information from their operating partner CRS on a day-to-day basis. Therefore, reporting and data visualization are key features of the HCMS platform.

HCMS was first used with the ONCHO campaign in late 2020. It was a campaign for distribution of drugs to prevent what is commonly known as River Blindness, with eligibility based on some key criteria. Even if a person was deemed not eligible, their information is collected and used to support the upcoming campaigns. That way, CRS knows when the same household benefits from other types of health services, and the full picture of assistance they received is tracked easily.

In July 2021, SMC (Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention) started on the HCMS platform and will go on until October 2021. SMC is a campaign against Malaria that kicks off every year in multiple sub-Saharan countries to provide prevention drugs to children between 3 and 60 months old. It’s important for the CRS Benin team to know that the children are re-visited every month consistently. The HCMS platform allows tracking of the beneficiary over the 4-month period by allowing the child’s record to be looked up in the application and provides accountability by incorporating data elements like GPS to help validate the household.

The HCMS platform is already planned to be used in other health campaigns in the future, such as Meningitis. It is proving a valuable health management system that can track public health projects affecting large populations, including an entire country.