5 Ways We Provide Life-Saving Care to Children Using Our Mobile App

Kupenda uses its Child Case Management Mobile Application to track child progress, provide local leaders with child counseling guides, and ensure children with urgent needs can access timely care.

Some of the life-saving ways this app has helped children in our program include the following:

1.Preventing and Addressing Abuse: The app enables Kupenda’s trained disability advocates to help children who are being sexually abused. In one instance, an advocate quickly notified our Kenyan staff of an abusive situation. The staff intervened the same day by connecting the child and family to a therapist. The therapist then helped the child access medical care and legal support and helped the mother to establish a safety plan. Today, the father is facing prosecution.

2. Screening for Families for Covid-19: The app also includes a Covid-19 screening tool and referral service. Community leaders used these features to screen more than 1,000 children and their family members for Covid-19 symptoms during the pandemic. Today, the app continues to enable leaders to provide immediate medical service referrals for children showing signs of COVID-19 infection, malnutrition, illness, or abuse.

3. Finding New Children in Need: Using the app, our trained local leader child advocates are able to locate and identify children with disabilities in need. During the pandemic, these leaders registered and counseled more than 300 new children. We then provided them with nutritional and medical care, service referrals, soap, masks, and medications. Now that Kenya’s schools have reopened, we are helping them to access tuition and enrollment support.

4. Gathering Government Disability Data: Kupenda has been a trusted disability advisor to the Kenyan government for more than 20 years. Now our app is enabling us to gather and share data on disability prevalence, outcomes, and needs to support new county- and national-level programs and policies that will provide further support to Kenyan families impacted by disability.

5. GIS Mapping for Community Care Coordination: We are integrating the app with a GIS map of our innovation center in Kilifi County, Kenya that shows where children live, what their needs are, and what services have or have not been provided. This map will allow us to prioritize and coordinate our community outreach efforts so more children are served each time we conduct food delivery, home visits, mobile clinics, or trainings. This map and our app’s reporting features also allow us to prepare and share data that inspires ministries, organizations, and agencies to implement policies and systems that help vulnerable children access the services they need to thrive.

Finally, we are analyzing and cleaning the two years of program data we’ve collected through the app and are using these results to develop strategic plans that will expand our program reach and further strengthen our impact!

Please consider donating here to help us continue to strengthen and utilize this tool to provide life-saving care to children with disabilities!

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If you’re interested in supporting one of the many children we serve, head over to our sponsorship page to learn about how you can make a difference for just $30 / month.

You can also help children with disabilities stay safe and healthy during COVID-19 by donating here.