What have been the experiences, challenges and outcomes of using Digital Payments for Campaign Health Workers in Sub-Saharan Africa

Efforts to improve health worker payments have largely focused on digitizing payments through mobile money payments.   For campaign health workers (Vaccinators/educators/VHTs) digital payments are particularly important since many of them are informal workers not receiving salaries from government.

Research shows that health workers in Africa are more likely to have a mobile money account than the average person and the digital payments project seeks to identify how, and under what circumstances digital payment of health workers can support effective campaign delivery and enhance efforts to digitize payments for health workers by fostering and supporting evidence-based and evidence-driven decision making in Africa.

A case in point, e-cash/ digital payments mechanisms have been reported to be behind the success of the polio immunization campaign in Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) because it ensured there was no leakage or delay in compensation of frontline workers. Harnessing digital solutions for health workers will not only strengthen the response to emergencies in the continent and beyond but also ensure rapid reliable, and efficient payment of frontline workers involved in specifically immunization campaigns is done.

However, a better understanding of bottlenecks to payments could facilitate further improvements in payment processes, including integration into m-health efforts to digitize and standardize processes of documentation and verification of work.

To make this happen, we need a conceptual understanding of the potential impacts of digitizing payments on health system performance, provider well-being, and patient outcomes are needed

We also aim to learn how these digital payment systems strengthen or disrupt the complex health system.

Discussion questions on today’s topic:

1. What is the utility of digital payments for improving health care performance in SSA?  / Share evidence on the models used for digitizing health worker payments.
2. What barriers have been experienced in rolling out digital payments and how have these been bridged?
3. How do we ensure that digital payments improve the performance of healthcare workers/vaccination campaign workers?

Are you a health manager, health worker, village health team member, district finance officer, student, or digital manager? Please join our community of practice today and contribute to what will better digital payments in our health system.