USAID Development Innovation Ventures and Dimagi partner on child health in northern Nigeria

USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures has awarded Dimagi a grant to scale and evaluate Connect, tackling the declining and uneven coverage of child health interventions that reduce child mortality in underserved communities.

Across several high-need regions of northern Nigeria, where child health coverage is critically low, the project lets locally led organizations and Frontline Workers opt into additional paid, purposeful delivery of door-to-door Child Health Campaign activities for children under five. The interventions include Vitamin A supplementation and oral rehydration solution with zinc.

The challenge

Vitamin A deficiency is a leading cause of child blindness and mortality, and diarrhea remains a major cause of death among children under five. These interventions are inexpensive and easy to administer, yet they still fail to reach many children in the poorest, hardest-to-reach communities.

How Connect helps

Built on the CommCare platform, Connect adds decision support, data capture, and GPS verification for accountability, along with a pay-for-performance model in which Dimagi contracts with locally led organizations to deliver the Child Health Campaign cost-effectively.

We are excited to partner with USAID Development Innovation Ventures to scale Connect. This funding will let us deliver life-saving health interventions to millions of children, making sure even the most marginalized communities have access to essential health services, while improving frontline worker jobs for long-term progress in community-based care.

Jonathan Jackson, Chief Executive Officer, Dimagi

Building the evidence

Innovations for Poverty Action will run a randomized controlled trial to test whether Connect increases coverage of Vitamin A and oral rehydration solution, especially among the most vulnerable children, compared with existing approaches.