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Mobile Training and Support (MOTS) Service: Umurinzi Campaign Program Post-Test Report

As of February 11, 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) had documented 3,432 Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and 2,253 deaths, resulting in a case fatality ratio of 66 percent. The outbreak in the DRC makes it the second deadliest outbreak (with the 2014-2016 West Africa epidemic being the first) and continues to raise concerns about the potential of the virus to cross international borders. To address this concern, the EBOLA vaccine Deployment, Acceptance & Compliance (EBODAC) consortium, which was designed to respond to the West Africa outbreak in Sierra Leone, received permission in 2019 to expand its activities into the border region of the DRC. In Rwanda, the Mobile Training and Support Service (MOTS) is being used for training of CHWs on issues concerning their Ebola vaccination campaign. MOTS is based on Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology and is designed to deliver audio-based refresher trainings on the topics of vaccines and outbreak response including Ebola disease surveillance procedures. MOTS also incorporates IVR-based quiz questions associated with each training unit. Post-test quiz data indicates that while the majority of the CHWs scored 50% and above in the post training test, only about a quarter of them reached the target of 80% in terms of correct answers. The program team should consider qualitatively interviewing the CHWs to understand how they used the system and answered the quiz questions as well as to understand the difficulties they experienced with some sessions.