The deployment of Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) is a critical program undertaking requiring precise planning, effective execution, and robust monitoring and evaluation to track performance against targets. As part of strengthening IRS monitoring and evaluation, Zimbabwe’s National Malaria Control Program (NMCP) utilized DHIS2 for daily reporting and tracking the IRS campaign in 30 target districts during the 2021-2022 season. IRS campaign digitization was critical to provide management with prompt insights on IRS deployment progress given the COVID-19 related disruptions and complexities such as delayed shipment of commodities (Personal protective equipment, insecticides-with an insecticide deficit of 34%), increased logistical requirements to comply with C-19 containment measures and the risk of low community acceptance fearing COVID-19 transmission.
The DHIS2 android capture and dashboards were used in seven provinces in the 30 IRS targeted districts. The rollout process involved training IRS data management staff and their line managers to capture data on daily spray performance aggregated from spray operator notebooks, stock records, and vehicle logbooks to monitor spray campaign progress. Communication structures were set up to provide prompt troubleshooting support at all administrative levels. A weekly performance bulletin was circulated to provide management insights on areas of immediate attention and provide greater visibility of the teams’ performance against targets on a number of indicators which include, population protected, rooms coverages, fuel consumption and insecticide usage.
Interim results show that the IRS campaign reached 95% of the 2.5m rooms targeted, achieving a spray coverage of 85% of these targeted rooms. The interim coverage for population protected is currently at 89% of 3.7m targeted people in the 30 IRS districts. The timeous IRS data submissions from campsites allowed the management to check areas with low coverages, prioritize callbacks, and provide supportive supervision resulting in an additional 4.8% of targeted rooms being sprayed from the callbacks during the IRS campaign.
The NMCP was able to prioritize districts for supportive supervision and reallocate excess insecticides from districts that had completed spraying to those that had gaps to overcome shortages that delayed shipments had induced. Overall, DHIS2 reduced the lag time between data generation, analysis, and use to inform decisions. This was critical to program managers, given the complexities brought by covid-19 when management required prompt feedback on IRS coverage to decide on corrective measures such as mop-up campaigns.