Multilingual Mobile Malaria Survey

The Challenge

More than 16 million people are at risk of malaria in Zambia. In 2015 alone there were over 5 million malaria cases with one in five children under age five infected with malaria parasites.  The disease remains a significant threat to all people Zambians, but most of all to populations working in agriculture in rural areas with little access to treatments and mitigation resources.

As a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia, I saw firsthand how malaria impacted smallholder farmers. Each year I would attend the funerals of young children in my community who had contracted malaria and not made it through.  My experiences led me to participate in Peace Corps Zambia’s National Malaria Committee, which coordinated volunteer efforts to most effectively encourage malaria interventions throughout the country. My time in that committee demonstrated the need for a tool to quickly and effectively conduct community-based surveys on bednet use and other intervention behaviors.

The Approach

At the same time, I had been experimenting with Open Data Kit, an open-source mobile-based app initially funded by Google and used by a range of organizations including WHO, CDC, USAID, the Red Cross and Red Crescent, the Carter Center, and the Jane Goodall Institute. This software was built specifically for anyone to build user-friendly mobile surveys and to upload the data securely to the cloud for parsing and analysis.

The Details

During evenings in my community, drawing power from a solar-powered car battery, I built a mobile multi-lingual malaria survey hosted on AWS for use with Open Data Kit.  This survey also incorporated conditional-logic to ensure that surveys were concise and targeted, and implemented GPS to record the location of survey entries. In using mobile phones and cellular data networks, data entry was not necessary, and analysis of the raw data could be done on the cloud directly.

This survey was the base file for a national mobile malaria survey conducted by the Peace Corps following my service.