Emboldened by cracking the Zoom technology in Module 1 and 2, we decided to see if we could get participants trained online to use our monitoring system as well. This was ambitious as the training is extremely ‘techi’ and required huge patience as everyone struggled for the first time to follow detailed instructions from our monitoring officer Julia Pantoglou who was conducting the sessions from Greece! She was working with 21 participants in three different sites, two in Malawi and one in Kenya to demonstrate how to use our online register of CHC on the www.chcahead website.
First of all everyone had to be equipped with a smart phone, a network and airtime, and then download our Africa AHEAD App onto their phone. They had to register as a user, download the survey and then do some test runs of the survey. These test surveys were then sent to the ODK survey where Julia received them, down loaded the CSV and send it to the website for them to logon read their data. Some might say we were crazy to try, but guess what? It worked. By the end of the 5 session training all participants were up and running with our monitoring system. Who says Africa is not tech-savy?
A month later the Kenya programme has done almost 300 surveys of their base line and things are moving fast in Malawi as well. The proof for us is that no one needed any more help. Africa is definitely getting connected at last.