Beginning from next month,  the payroll system of the Youth Employment Agency (YEA) will never be the same.

This follows the donation of 1,000 smartphones by the One Million Community Health Workers (1mCHW) Campaign of Millennium Promise Alliance (MPA) to the Agency.

The smartphones, with a built-in Community-electronic Tracking system (CeTracker), will help to minimize,  if not totally eliminate ghost names from the payroll system of the YEA. 

The CeTracker,  an innovation from the 1mCHW Campaign uses GPS and tracks where Community Health Workers (CHWs) who are supervised by the Community Health Officers (CHOs) in their respective CHPS zones,  are located and provides a dashboard to evaluate their performance. 

With this system, non-performing CHWs and eHealth Technical Assistants and those not at post are easily identified. 

The smartphones are expected to be used by the CHWs and eHealth Technical Assistants of the Youth Employment Agency operating in all the districts of Ashanti Region.

The CHWs who will be supervised by the CHOs are expected to use the smartphones to register household members including, pregnant women, children and track individual health problems at household level while supporting them through referrals to receive treatment at health facilities and to the Tele Consultation Centres.

Presenting the smartphones to the YEA at a short ceremony in Accra on Monday, the Country Director of Millennium Promise, Chief Nat Ebo Nsarko, said “It is our strong belief that this donation, coupled with ICT application system developed by the Campaign, can help strengthen the monitoring and evaluation capabilities already initiated by the YEA”.

He added “We are by this, leveraging on Sustainable Development Goal 17, Partnerships, to achieving good health and wellbeing (Sustainable Development Goal 3) and creating sustainable employment. This is our contribution to Ghana’s efforts towards digitizing systems and institutions to further project the country’s leadership on the Sustainable Development Goals. Such a drive will lead to the greater inclusion of the population and ensure that no one is left behind”.

Commenting further, he said Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have great potential to improve healthcare in Ghana by enhancing access to health information and making health services more efficient.

ICTs, he added, can also contribute to improving the quality of services at household and community levels and reduce the cost of healthcare.

“That is the reason 1mCHW Campaign is supporting YEA and the Ghana Health Service to establish a robust, real-time, quality, community-health information system that provides health managers 360 degrees view of health situation for better-informed decision making,” Mr. Nsarko stressed.

He assured the YEA of his outfit’s commitment to working with them to further strengthen their monitoring system to identify defaulters of beneficiaries of their respective programs.

Receiving the smartphones, the Chief Executive Officer of YEA, Justin Kodua, lauded his outfit’s relationship with the 1mCHW Campaign, noting that the benefits they have derived from the relationship have been immense.

“The CHWs are beneficiaries working in areas that most people will not go, rural areas where access to those areas is sometimes impossible. With the advent of these smartphones, it is going to help a long way in our health sector delivery because there are certain treatments which can be given by our beneficiaries but yet still, they will need to get in touch with some health experts. To avoid the hustle that one goes through in filling the forms, these new smartphones are going to go a long way whereby at one point we will be able to capture the data of the patient, prescribe what is wrong with the person, and instantly diagnose the person’s sickness and provide the necessary treatment. This is a wonderful project coming to this country,” he noted.

Concerned about the two-year exit plan of the YEA where trained health professionals are expected to exit the program and completing their service, Mr. Kodua appealed to the Ghana Health Service to help absorb beneficiaries who will be exiting the program to enable them to continue the good work they are doing for the country.

“We need to have a second look at the exit phase of the YEA project. At the end of the day, if the two years come and the people return the phones and new ones are recruited and trained on how it works, it is going to create a bit of a lacuna. I will plead with the Ghana Health Service that those of our beneficiaries going to exit next year, they should be able to roll them unto the health service sector whereby they can continue to provide this kind of services to the health sector.”

Monday’s donation makes it three in a series of interventions already undertaken by 1mCHW Campaign to create the enabling environment to spur Ghana’s 360 degrees health data revolution campaign.

In October 2016, at the maiden Ashanti Regional CHPS Forum, the Campaign donated 936 smartphones, 81 tablets and 9 laptops to the Ghana Health Service in Ashanti Region. In December the same year, donations of 500 tablets and 500 sleeveless were made to the Youth Employment Agency at a launch ceremony in Accra.

At the 72nd UN General Assembly, the Campaign again made a donation of 6,000 smartphones to President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo at the Sustainable Development Conference in New York to assist the work of the Community Health Workers.