Lwala Community Alliance

Migori County, Kenya is a historically under-resourced county where communities have been cut off from the formal healthcare system. Lwala equips Community Health Workers, including former traditional birth attendants, with mobile tablets and customized applications to provide access to critical health services. At global scale, this solution would support rural communities to access community-led healthcare.

Migori County suffers from some of the highest rates of maternal and child mortality and HIV prevalence in Kenya, including a maternal mortality rate of 673 per 100,000 live births, an under-5 mortality rate of 82 per 1,000 live births, an HIV prevalence of 16-20% (compared to the national rate of 6%).

The national government has alienated and criminalized traditional birth attendants, a cadre of potential health workers that have tremendous influence on the health-seeking behaviors of their communities. Indeed, traditional birth attendants provide more than half of all deliveries in Kenya. These change-agents hold legitimacy within the populations they serve, shaping opinions on birthing, family planning, breastfeeding, and HIV. Despite this, they have been routinely ostracized by government decision-makers.

Lwala works in a rural region of Kenya that has traditionally been cut off from the formal healthcare system. Lwala empowers this community to design, implement, and govern a community-led health model that incorporates former traditional birth attendants as Community Health Workers. Community Health Workers use tablets with customized mobile applications to provide healthcare and referral services to the community. The tablets and application link rural households with high quality healthcare.

Lwala's solution is to provide Community Health Workers, including former traditional birth attendants, with tablets and a mobile health application, Lwala Mobile, to connect rural households with high quality healthcare. The application allows Community Health Workers to track their households during monthly home visits, receive real-time decision support on complicated cases, and manage timelines for important services, such as vaccinations. The mobile application is built on CommCare, which allows Community Health Workers to input information anywhere and then sync remotely when they have internet access. Lwala's sophisticated data system then flows all of this data into Salesforce, where a monitoring & evaluation team can manage the data. This solution connects remote communities with formal healthcare and essential health services.