Amref Health Africa – Leap

Leap is Amref Health Africa’s mobile learning app for health workers. As part of the Ethiopian government’s comprehensive COVID-19 approach, Amref has been appointed to roll out Leap to train health workers. The partnership will help Amref them a first cohort of 7,000 health workers through a phone based mobile learning solution, an efficient means given that Ethiopia has 90% mobile service coverage across the country. 

 Ethiopia’s healthcare challenges 

Despite the efforts made in the past two decades to increase the number and skill mix of health work forces, Ethiopia still has a very low health workforce density, specifically Medical Doctors, Health Officers, Nurses and Midwives.  Health extension workers, the frontline health workers that provide primary care in Ethiopia, can fill a part of this gap. To that end, the Federal Ministry of Health is seeking to upgrade and increase the number of HEWs, particularly in remote areas, and address concerns about HEWs’ education and practices.

Amref solution: train community health workers through mobile learning 

The traditional face to face learning practices will not be able to train health extension workers at the pace and scale required to fill the health workers gap in Ethiopia. By deploying Leap, a basic phone mobile learning solution, Amref can train health workers rapidly, at scale. With more than 90 percent of Ethiopia’s geographic area having access to mobile service, the mobile phones offer tremendous opportunities in efficient health training delivery. 

Working with the Ethiopian Ministry of Health, Amref is using Leap to inform community health workers about COVID-19, deploying modules to different cadres of health workers: frontline health workers, community health workers and point of entry surveillance officers.

Our work with Amref

We have been partnering with Amref Health Africa for over 5 years. Discover more about what we do together.

Supporting African entrepreneurs to develop home-grown innovations for health: this is the goal of Innovate for Life, an initiative launched by Amref Health Africa. The Elsevier Foundation is proud to support Amref’s goal to help early-stage entrepreneurs in developing novel technological solutions. The Fund aims to bridge the gap between African entrepreneurs and international investors by offering deep subject matter knowledge, strong networks and access to funding.

Targeting both pre-service and in-service health workers -Nurses, Clinical officers, Jibu is serving as an on-job support tool and a general health worker training tool. It also provides an opportunity to access over 30 courses within the system. With an ideal goal of virtualizing the classroom experience by providing collaborative learning through forum discussions and peer to peer collaboration, there is high learner interaction and mentorship by subject matter experts.