Opportunity: The World Bank – where I worked for several years – offers many different types of financing options to support country governments and instutitions within them. One such option is called Performance-Based Financing (PBF), which essentially makes funding contingent upon the recipient meeting certain standards or indicators, as agreed upon in advance. In Nigeria, a PBF program for healthcare centers in Nasarawa County included many types of indicators towards their PBF performance, but none of them included how patients felt about the services they received! The World Bank Social Accountability and ICT and Innovation teams, in partnership with Reboot, worked together on a big project to design a new mobile-based system to allow patients to provide feedback on clinics in their area, and in turn have patient satisfaction be a factor in determining funding renewal.

Year: 2014-2015

Role: Technical manager and supporting designer

Process: This project in total took about two years to implement, largely due to changes in political administrations, delays in procurement, and internal staffing changes. However, the team remained dedicated to making sure this project was researched and designed with respect and dignity for all stakeholders involved. Reboot opened a Nigeria office, where I lived for weeks at a time, and we all spent the first few months of the project simply researching the healthcare context in Nasarawa and understanding the intricate power dynamics at play within these systems. We partnered with everyone from Ministry of Health staff and clinic administrators all the way to local community councils and traditional healers, making sure to incorporate everyone’s thoughts and ideas into the design of the program. Ultimately, after research and synthesis, we arrived at the design of MyVoice, which we partnered with Caktus Consulting (a software development firm) to develop the software tool, which we then tested and piloted in the fall of 2014, to much success.

Outputs: MyVoice, the full-fledged SMS based patient feedback system that we designed and developed, launched as a pilot in Nasarawa August 2014. It continued to run for a few months until the pilot ended, at which point it was handed to the Nigerian government for implementation. Reboot also published a report detailing the entire project and process, available on their website. Additionally, in 2015, MyVoice won the Core77 Design Award for Social Impact, illustrating how successful a truly local and collaborative project could be!