Until now, many of Uganda’s 180,000 community health workers have gone unaccounted for in the formal health system. Who are they? What services are they providing, and who trained them? The Uganda Ministry of Health is using a new registry—developed using IntraHealth International’s open source iHRIS software —to find out. The registry tracks critical personnel data that answer these questions, and its implementation is one of the first steps in...

A 2015 study revealed that 50% of health workers in Uganda’s public sector weren’t showing up, or came to work but left early to collect dual pay at another facility. Today, that number is down to 11.9%, thanks to a new monitoring system that helps health officials track and analyze attendance data and take appropriate actions against chronically absent staff. Health worker absenteeism undermines staff morale and the quality of care patients...

Allison Annette Foster was enjoying Thanksgiving dinner with her family in Dallas when her phone chimed. Her cheer faded as a clinical emergency began to unfold in a string of text messages among a group of nurses eight time zones away. It was the middle of the night in rural Zambia, and a 39-year-old pregnant woman had arrived at a local health post. A young nurse there was alone, as is often the case, and unsure of what to do. So he grabbed his...