The Tanzania Human Resource Capacity Project—a Capacity Project Associate Award—is supporting parasocial workers, a new cadre of community social worker serving the country’s most vulnerable children. To bolster this support, the IntraHealth International-led CapacityPlus global project is examining ways to use mobile phone technology as a tool for supportive supervision.

CapacityPlus staff Angela Self visited D-Tree International’s program to learn about its application of a low-cost tool used by community health workers to transmit data from maternal and child health-related activities via mobile phones. District visits and interviews with staff from the Tanzania Department of Social Welfare and the Tanzania Human Resource Capacity Project, as well as parasocial workers, their supervisors, community health workers, and social welfare officers provided the context, challenges, and opportunities within which a mobile health (mHealth) strategy would operate.

CapacityPlus is conducting a detailed review and discussion of the trip findings to determine the feasibility of developing an mHealth application to support the performance of parasocial workers.