mobile image

Khushi Baby: Case study by UNESCO-Pearson Initiative for Literacy

SDGs Impacted

Vaccines are widely accepted as vital for child well-being and survival. However, developing countries generally have a relatively high rate of child mortality, and one contributory factor is their low vaccination rate. India has the world’s highest proportion of deaths of children under 5 from pneumonia and diarrhea, accounting for one in five cases globally. India has reduced overall under-5 mortality, but rural child mortality remains twice that of urban districts. A primary constraint among rural health-care workers is a lack of reliable patient data when conducting clinical consultations. This feeds into a system that makes it difficult to identify where care is needed most, such as in high-risk pregnancies and vaccine needs among community nurses. Khushi Baby (KB) was launched in 2014 in the rural district of Udaipur, Rajasthan as a digital solution for tracking maternal and child health records. The system applies a multi-tier approach targeting government auxiliary nurse midwives (ANMs) through an interactive health-care mobile application, health administrators using a data dashboard for decision-making, and patients wearing the digital health record tracker. A key concept underpinning the design was that it had to work among communities with limited reading and technical literacy skills.

Impact / Outcome
Since its launch, KB has been deployed among 10,000 patients to successfully track over 50,000 vaccinations for children. The programme has also raised US$500,000 in donor funding, in part to carry out two separate randomized control trials to validate programme impact.
Funding sources
Public/Private
Key Metrics
Provide effective tracking of maternal and child health-care data for decision-making in rural India
Locations
India & South Asia, India
Sector
Health
Intervention lever
Policy
Operating model
Fully public
Target populations
Women & girls, Children, Rural
Year published
01 January 2017

The EDISON Alliance

A World Economic Forum Initiative