We are thrilled to announce an exciting collaboration between the Digital Health Payment Initiative and Research (DHPI-R) project and the World Health Organization's Africa Regional Office (WHO AFRO). Together, we are developing a comprehensive global research agenda focused on digital payments for campaign health workers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).
The DHPI-R project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has a mission to generate evidence on digital payments for campaign health workers, and assess its impact on the quality and coverage of vaccination campaigns across Africa.
This collaboration between Makerere University School of Public Health WHO AFRO,the University of Dakar Senegal (UCAD) and DHPI-R will identify and prioritize research areas that will accelerate the adoption and effectiveness of digital payments for campaign health workers.
The research agenda will focus on five key areas: adoption and acceptance, financial inclusion and economic empowerment, efficiency and accountability, impact on health worker motivation and retention, and campaign effectiveness.
To ensure the research agenda reflects the needs and aspirations of the healthcare community in SSA, the research questions will be sourced from gaps in existing studies and stakeholder engagement.
The identified questions will be organized into a pool, scored and weighted to determine research priorities.
Additionally, the project is also working on a supplement together with WHO AFRO based on the project research outputs on digital payments in sub-Saharan Africa. Its planning to have 8 research papers includng one editorial all based on digitized payments on campaign health workers and the expected time of publication is 2024.
The supplement rides on advancing knowledge through generation of evidence on contextual factors that contribute or deter the uptake or eventual scale-up of digital payments for campaign health worker.
This collaborative effort represents a significant milestone in the journey toward a more digitally empowered and efficient healthcare system in Sub-Saharan Africa.
By Judith Grace Amoit