Support to the public health section of the UNHCR
About
Description
CartONG has been supporting since 2011 UNHCR to improve nutrition, food security and health data collection, analysis and visualisation in the field including through the use of mobile technology. The support also looked into how to visualize and analyze those results spatially as well as through graphs and charts and wherever possible, offer a user-friendly way to generate and visualize crucial indicators.
CartONG supports UNHCR in the development and improvement of the tools used by field teams to collect data on nutrition, food security and health from all UNHCR projects around the world through the Standardized Expanded Nutrition Survey (SENS). This standardized data is a key element to deliver effective and timely interventions and improve outcomes.
This support took different forms over the years. We helped in the development of the mobile data collection tools, form coding and the development of data visualization platforms. The results can indeed be visualized either through the SENS mapper, which shows the different indicators on a map, or through public dashboards that show the aggregated results of the surveys by region, country and theme. CartONG also develops and makes available training documents and How-Tos and support the ongoing work of forms adjustments and improvements to the system to make it as user-friendly as possible and respond to any needs of the UNHCR field teams.
In the past, all relevant information linked to referrals from Primary to Secondary or Tertiary Health Facilities were covered in individual access databases. At the time, CartONG supported making these Access databases interoperable so that within a country the datasets could be merged and kept at the operation level. In 2019 UNHCR was seeking for a more user-friendly way to capture this information and also be able to easily analyse it at a global level. An online application with restricted access and permission system and data protection inbuilt was conceptualized based on the different user personas identified. The first rollout to the field started in 2021 and continues to date. Beyond the development of the application, over the years CartONG has been working on several improvements, to improve the system performance and its functionalities.
CartONG was requested by the UNHCR Public Health Team to update the forms related to the evaluation of Health Facilities (also known as the Balance Score Card) and find a way to make the process of capturing the information as easy as possible for the enumerators. CartONG worked with bar codes to ensure the information was mapped to the correct Health Facilities and maintained the location lists as well as the documentation ever since. In the meantime, UNHCR was also interested in having the results of those assessments mapped out on a global level and having the scores aggregated over form, sites and at country level. In order to meet these requirements, CartONG built a custom web application pulling in the data which was collected using UNHCR’s Kobo instance.
