Power of technology for training
A recent report - Preparing the next generation of community health workers: The power of technology for training, commissioned by Alliance member, "iheed", identifies opportunities to train community health workers more cost-effectively through technology- enabled multimedia content that leverages visuals, videos, or audio.
Additionally, it highlights the potential to create open, easily sharable digital content that could act as a crucial ingredient for new approaches to training. The biggest finding is that multimedia applications and digital content could enable training of one million new CHWs at less than a quarter of the cost of disseminating conventional training.
The objectives of Iheed are:
- To foster collaboration between development, education and mobile technology,communities to develop and deploy Community Health Worker mobile learning platforms and to provide a single source of expertise in this emerging field to Governments and development organisations.
- To create a platform-independent set of validated CHW-focussed content (diagnostic aids, training aids and communication aids) suitable for delivery via mobile devices, which will be freely available to relevant stakeholders.
- To support the roll-out of CHW strategies, working with and through Governments, to reduce training cost and time by introducing innovative training solutions to their programs.