Leveraging on Mobile Telephony to Strengthen Child Birth Registration Process in Tanzania: Proposed Prototype

Reliable data is one of the important assets of the success of public health systems. Decision makers, policy makers and health service providers need accurate and timely data in order to improve the quality of their services. The trends of growth of human population in developing country have increased pressure on the demand for demographic data availability by the policy and decision makers. Child birth data is vital in policy and health strategic plans of any society. Timely accurate data on the location and number of births and deaths are essential if a country is to determine spending priorities, and to formulate and monitor actions. Distribution and allocation of national resources, for example, becomes extremely tedious to systematize without timely and accurate demographic data. In this paper, a prototype for mobile-based child birth registration (MobReg) is proposed. The proposed prototype offers ways of registering child birth data through mobile phones and visualizes the collected data in a web application. The evaluation of the prototype seems to show the feasibility of mobile technologies, particularly in improving the current process of registering birth and provide data for health and population planning at regional levels with possible extrapolation to national levels. The use of cellular phones for child birth registration is therefore one of the most promising developments in the quest to achieve improved child health outcomes.