This community innovation has been accepted at the 2025 DHIS2 Annual Conference
The Districts of Excellence in Tanzania
Innovations bring technical and organisational changes which transform work practices and service delivery. This has had an all-round impact on the healthcare sector from curative services to preventive services, rehabilitative as well as palliative services. One victim area is that of data management which faces continuous innovations in data capturing, storage, analysis and sharing. While several studies have investigated individual innovations in data management and use, limited attention has been paid to the generic approaches to understanding and evaluating these innovations before implementation. Stakeholders often hesitate to adopt solutions to their business processes, following uncertainties about the types and extent of changes they will bring. This study presents the Districts of Excellence (DoE), an avenue for testing the feasibility of innovations before they are used. The DoE initiative in Tanzania is an action research that tests innovations in the health sector and draws lessons for applications to the rest of the country and beyond. It involves two councils in the Dodoma Region, Bahi representing the rural settings and Dodoma City representing the urban. In turn, the initiative has managed to test several innovative approaches including the best way to compute target populations for health facilities and the use of chatbots to help with continuous training on the use of the DHIS2. The initiative has also identified several challenges related to data use including the incomplete planning reports in the DHIS2, difficulties in tracking individual data elements to assess completeness, and others. Further, there are about eleven research studies on different areas of data management and use, three of which have been completed
Primary Author: Wilfred Senyoni
Keywords:
innovations, DHIS2, Districts of Excellence, Piloting, Tanzania, Data Management and Use
4 Likes