Research consultancy for ‘Tracking routine immunisation with biometrics in maternal and child health services project’, Ghana

Simprints develop innovative technology to help the world’s most vulnerable and marginalised populations access essential services through the design and development of biometric hardware and software to help verify coverage and impact of development partners.

Simprints has been working in Ghana since 2021, implementing the first and second phases of the project ‘Tracking routine immunisation with biometrics in maternal and child health services’ in partnership with the Ghana Health Service and with the direct support of GAVI. The second phase of this project; also referred to as the Proof of Concept phase, is currently being implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness of biometrics in Ghana’s health care delivery system starting with the maternal and child health (MCH) services delivery. This phase, which will run until January 2023 is expected to generate learnings that will support the design and intended scale up in the next phase.

Simprints is seeking a research and evaluation partner to explore the efficiency and effectiveness of the intervention, with a clear focus on gender-related drivers and barriers; the learnings from which are intended to be used in the design of the next phase of implementation.

The research will involve two components:

Research Objective 1: Comparative analysis of workflows

Component 1 of the research is a comparative analysis of the effectiveness and efficiency of 3 parallel workflows that community health workers use to collect patient and vaccine data. The research should answer the following questions:

• Where are the actual and perceived effectiveness and efficiency gains/ losses within and across each workflow specifically investigating factors such as
  • i) total time required to enrol and process clients?
  • ii) total time required to identify or verify clients previously enrolled CHWs?
  • iii) impact on CHW workload?
  • iv) impact on data accuracy?
  • Overall impact on service delivery including time lost in duplicate activities?
• What are the incentives/ disincentives to reliance on digital rather than paper-based system (including a exploration of policies, working norms, digital literacy etc)?
• To what extent does the use of biometrics encourage/ enforce the accurate use of the e-tracker and support the Government’s strategy to digitalise the health system?

Research Objective 2: Integrated gender analysis

Component 2 of the research should include a gender analysis to explore how the differences in male and female CHW and client’s conditions, roles, responsibilities, access to resources, and decision-making power affect the uptake of digital system to deliver and verify vaccinations

Specific areas to explore should include:

• How do the gender identities of male and female CHW and their supervisors impact the uptake of digital/ biometric system in the delivery of vaccines?
• How do gender identities of parents and their children affect the willingness of clients to accept the collection of their biometric data?

Full details of the project, research objectives and suggested methods can be found in the Research Terms of Reference.