Zambia Digital Community Health Project (ZDCHP)¶

Phase Two to Phase Four Implementation

1. Introduction¶

The Zambia Digital Community Health Project (ZDCHP) is a three-year initiative funded by a $3.4 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The project aims to support the growth and modernization of Zambia's community health system. Launched in November 2021, the project has four intermediate outcomes:
• Architecture/design defined for digital community health system.
• Evidence generation through pilots.
• Robust scaling/national rollout plan that all stakeholders are aligned on and that locks in future funding sources for sustainability.
• Talent plan for increased capacity at the Ministry of Health (MoH), supported with non- governmental partners to coordinate digital community health implementation.
Once achieved, these outcomes will produce a functional, user-oriented CHiP with prioritized disease condition data collection modules that the MoH leads, pilots and begins to scale with funding from multiple sources, and will ultimately contribute to lowering the burden of disease through increased coverage and quality of care.

2. Background¶

Zambia has a long history of community health workers (CHWs) playing a vital role in delivering primary health care. However, the CHW workforce is under-resourced and lacks access to essential tools and information. This has led to disparities in health outcomes, with those living in rural areas and marginalized communities often being the most affected.
The ZDCHP aims to address these challenges by developing a digital community health system that will provide CHWs with the tools and information they need to deliver high-quality care. The system will be designed to be interoperable with other digital health platforms in Zambia, ensuring that data is shared and used effectively to improve health outcomes.

3. ProjectStrategy¶

The ZDCHP uses a phased approach to achieve its goals and objectives. The first phase of the project focused on defining the architecture and design of the digital community health system. This involved conducting a series of consultations with CHWs, health care providers, Ministry of Health programmatic staff and other stakeholders to understand their needs and priorities with regard to community health services.
The second to fourth phase of the project will focus on generating evidence on the effectiveness of the digital community health system through pilots in selected districts. The pilots will test the system's functionality and usability and collect data on its impact on health outcomes.