Altron Karabina has partnered with Goodbye
Malaria to enhance the use of data to help eliminate
the disease. The organisation was faced with the
challenge that its technology platform and data
capturing systems were no longer able to effectively
support its LSDI2 initiative. An automated solution
helps the organisation visualise and benefit from the
information that it has captured, without having to
constantly create manual reports.
AFRICA
REGIONAL
CHANNELS
AFRICA
ALTRON KARABINA UPDATES GOODBYE
MALARIA’S TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM AND
DATA CAPTURING SYSTEMS
While preventable and
curable, Malaria ranks as
one of the most severe
public health issues across
the globe and is a leading cause of death and
disease in many developing countries, with
young children and pregnant women being
the most severely impacted groups.
In 2018, it was estimated that some
228 million cases of Malaria occurred
worldwide, with approximately 405,000
deaths recorded in that year. Of this, the
African region is disproportionately affected,
accounting for 93% of Malaria cases and 94%
of Malaria deaths.
One of the worst hit countries is
Mozambique, burdened with 4% of the
world’s cases of the mosquito-borne
infectious disease in 2018.
Social benefit organisation, Goodbye
Malaria, was established in 2013 as a crossborder
initiative between South Africa,
Eswatini and Mozambique to drive Malaria
eradication programmes in Mozambique and
the Southern African region.
Goodbye Malaria is strongly supported by
restaurant group, Nando’s, which provided the
initial funding for its establishment. A public
private partnership concluded over three
years ago between Goodbye Malaria, the
Global Fund and the governments of the three
countries has further bolstered the Lubombo
Spatial Development Initiative 2 (LSDI2)
– Goodbye Malaria’s co-ordinated on-theground
programme to eradicate the disease.
LSDI2 has already yielded measurable
success through its key intervention – Indoor
Residual Spraying (IRS), which has been
running for the past eight years.
Last year, the programme sprayed
450,000 houses and protected 1.7 million
people from Malaria infection. This year,
Goodbye Malaria is targeting 531,000
houses and protecting over 1.9 million
people before the rainy season starts in
October/November.
The problem: Outdated technology
and poor quality data
With the rapid expansion of the LSDI2,
Goodbye Malaria was faced with the
challenge that its technology platform and
data capturing systems were no longer able
to effectively support the initiative, which
created several challenges. As Mozambique
has significant connectivity challenges, Altron
Karabina implemented a phase one solution
that provided a template sheet which was
filled in manually by the programme’s spray
teams to capture data about houses that
had been sprayed and their occupants. These
sheets were then sent to Nando’s IT division
to capture all the spray information that
the programme required, and this data was
stored in a central data warehouse.
The solution: Innovation
and collaboration
Altron Karabina subsequently updated the
existing system to use the Microsoft Power
BI reporting environment and created a
dashboard that enabled the programme
to make better spray-based decisions and
capture richer and better quality data.
The data capture mechanism itself was
also updated to allow direct form capture in
Mozambique, with verification mechanisms
that synchronised master data to ensure
that capturing mistakes were reduced by
limiting capture to appropriate entries. This
reduction in errors allowed more information
to be stored – such as demographics about
the inhabitants of the sprayed houses and
the type of structures themselves, which in
turn allowed the planning model to be far
more accurate. •
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS
INTELLIGENT
TECH CHANNELS Issue 31
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