Illustrating the Gaps and Needs in the Training Support of Community Health Workers in India

In India and other developing countries, Community Health Workers (CHWs) provide the first line of care in delivering necessary maternal and child health services. In this work, we assess the training and skill-building needs of CHWs, through a mobile-based training intervention deployed for six months to 500 CHWs for conducting 144 training sessions in rural India. We qualitatively probed 1178 questions, asked by CHWs, during training sessions, and conducted a content analysis of the learning material provided to CHWs. Further, we interviewed 48 CHWs to understand the rationale of information seeking and perceptions of training needs. We present our understanding of the knowledge gaps of CHWs and how the current learning material and training methods are ineffective in addressing it. Our study presents design implications for HCI4D researchers for mobile learning platforms targeted towards CHWs. We also provide policy-level suggestions to improve the training of CHWs in India or a similar context.