Wearing away the stones: SMS messaging supports children’s wellbeing
New digital innovations help health workers monitor child and maternal health and provide critical services through community health posts.
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In the hilly, scenic village of Paya Seunara on Sabang island, promoting child immunization is far from an easy task. Fears of side effects are often touted by hesitant parents, as are concerns over whether vaccines are halal.
But it is a challenge that Nurbaiti, a volunteer health worker at the local posyandu, embraced with open arms. Posyandu are community health posts where health workers like Nurbaiti monitor the nutrition and health of toddlers and pregnant women, including their vaccination status.
Indonesia is home to the fourth-highest number of unimmunized children in the world. In Aceh Province, the childhood vaccination rate is lower than the national average, leading to a higher rate of under-five mortality. You can take part by helping UNICEF and Nurbaiti through this link.
Nurbaiti could not sit idly by while seeing children in her village exposed to the risks of preventable diseases, even if that meant getting the cold shoulder from some families or being seen as a foe by others.
“We cannot force parents. All we can do is embrace them and help them to understand why their children need immunization,” she explains.
As part of her work, Nurbaiti helps collect the names and birth dates of babies as well as the posyandu they are registered at for monthly growth monitoring. She normally gathers this information from parents and caregivers when they attend sessions at the posyandu, but at times, she needs to go door to door.
This is not new to Nurbaiti, who used to help the village midwives to carry out neonatal home visits up in the hills where they had to leave their motorbikes behind and walk to see the families living there.
With so much on her plate, Nurbaiti was pleased when she learned that UNICEF launched a campaign in 2019 to send SMS messages to caregivers reminding them to bring their children to the posyandu. The messages also provide immunization schedules and child development milestones based on the children’s age. The UNICEF messages are sent directly to parents’ smartphones thanks to the information collected by Nurbaiti and other health workers. You can make a donation to support health workers like Nurbaiti.
“With these reminders, we [health workers] don’t have to work alone to encourage parents to get their children vaccinated,” Nurbaiti says.
“If they forget the schedules – or if they were never willing to begin with – the messages can prod them.”
The SMS service is part of the e-Posyandu digital monitoring system launched in eight districts in Aceh with the support of UNICEF using the RapidPro and ONA web-based platforms to create a real-time data collection system. RapidPro delivers the SMS messages to parents about their children’s health and sends out reminders to pregnant women about antenatal care and iron consumption based on their trimester.
Meanwhile, the ONA platform facilitates both online and offline data collection with a high degree of accuracy and efficiency, minimizing the risk of human error and helping health staff in regions with unreliable internet connection. The data collected is then visualized in a dedicated website that offers insights for more accurate and timely evidence-based interventions.
In recent years, Indonesia’s health system has made major strides in going digital, even down to the smallest posyandu. By enabling communication between the Government and communities through e-Posyandu, parents can regularly receive important health information via their smartphones, while health workers can communicate closely with staff from district health offices through WhatsApp. The new monitoring system also supports authorities to better track public health while providing insights on how different posyandu are performing.
For Nurbaiti, innovations like e-Posyandu bring hope for the improvement of children’s health in her village. She likens her efforts to a constant drip of water wearing away stone – with the right continuous approach, parents can become more open to what is best for their children. Your generosity can help us develop innovations like e-Posyandu that improve access to health services in Indonesia. Donate to UNICEF now!
“If they’re angry, then we can’t be emotional too,” she says.
“We have to cool our heads and keep smiling, even if we’re hurt. That’s the only way to go.”
