How an app is transforming schistosomiasis control in Ghana

When Gideon Kye-Duodu began work on what would become the MedScale Schisto App, he was not only building a digital tool but confronting a stubborn public health problem, such as schistosomiasis, that refused to yield, despite years of intervention.

Schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease spread through contaminated freshwater, remained common in riverine and hard-to-reach communities across Ghana’s Volta and Oti regions.

Mass drug administration (MDA) campaigns were falling short. Coverage was incomplete, households were missed, and records were scattered across paper forms.

Reporting was slow, often arriving too late to inform real-time decisions.

Then came COVID-19, and the fragile system cracked further. “COVID-19 led to the postponement of many MDA campaigns, especially in endemic areas,” Kye-Duodu said.

Turning disruption into opportunity

For Kye-Duodu, the lead researcher for this project, a public health researcher and lecturer at the Fred N. Binka School of Public Health, University of Health and Allied Sciences in Ghana, this moment of disruption became a turning point.

What if health workers could see, in real time, who had received treatment and who had been left behind?

What if data could move as quickly as the diseases they were trying to control?

If he could see precisely where the system was failing, he could design something to fill those gaps.

That thinking led to the development of MedScaleApp, a mobile and web-based platform developed with funding from the Science Granting Councils Initiative (SGCI). The platform equips frontline health workers with tools to plan, execute, and monitor drug distribution campaigns in real time.

From Paper to Real-Time Action

Instead of juggling paper records, frontline health workers, from district directors and disease control officers to community drug distributors, can now register households digitally, track drug distribution as it happens, and instantly identify individuals who have been missed.

The app flags gaps, records adverse events, and generates real-time reports through GPS-enabled dashboards.

“It replaces paper-based systems with a simpler, real-time workflow,” Kye-Duodu said. “It improves accuracy, saves time, and strengthens accountability.”

The app also includes offline functionality, which proved critical in communities with limited internet access or unreliable electricity, precisely the communities most vulnerable to being overlooked by conventional systems.

The Woman Who Kept Being Missed

In Chantai, a remote community in Krachi West, a market woman who frequently travelled had repeatedly missed previous drug campaigns. She and her children had slipped through the cracks repeatedly.

A health worker flagged that she had not been reached and followed up at her home. She and her children received treatment, and for the first time, she understood why the treatment mattered and why she was being sought out.

Across communities, the team also encountered resistance, some rooted in suspicion, others in cultural hesitation.

In one case, a child refused treatment because his parents had warned him against it. Rather than marking the household as a refusal and moving on, the team followed up. They sat with the parents, answered their questions, and addressed their concerns. The child was eventually treated.

These follow-ups, Kye-Duodu noted, were only possible because the app made it visible who had been missed and who needed to be reached.

Without that visibility, those families might never have been found.

The numbers behind the impact

In North Dayi, where the project’s main intervention took place, MDA coverage climbed from approximately 69 per cent to around 80 per cent, a meaningful gain in a context where every percentage point represents real people protected from disease.

Beyond the numbers, Kye-Duodu said tracking improved significantly and communities became more engaged with treatment schedules, partly because the follow-up process made people feel seen rather than overlooked.

The project launched in 2022 with initial assessments and stakeholder engagement, moved into field implementation across 2023 and 2024, and is now in its dissemination and publication phase. The field work is largely complete, but the project continues.

Challenges on the ground

The journey has not been without obstacles.

Funding delays slowed early implementation. Administrative bottlenecks created setbacks. Limited internet connectivity and unreliable electricity in remote areas posed persistent challenges. At one point, even the original study site had to be changed.

Yet, through close collaboration with stakeholders, careful field planning, and the integration of offline capabilities, the team adapted.

The role of SGCI support

SGCI’s role in making MedScaleApp possible was more than financial.

Kye-Duodu recalled that when he first applied for the grant, he believed the funding was coming from Ghana’s Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation. It was only after his application was successful and he attended the inception meeting that he encountered SGCI and came to understand its broader mandate.

“SGCI provided not just financing but a platform to showcase and refine our solution within a pan-African ecosystem,” he said.

The funding supported the app’s design and development, pilot and post-intervention fieldwork, equipment, training, and participation in knowledge-sharing events, including the RIM Annual Symposium in Uganda.

Scaling for the future

Now in its dissemination phase, the MedScaleApp project stands at a pivotal moment.

Scaling it will require more than technology. It will depend on integration into the Ghana Health Service system, sustained investment in digital tools, continuous training for health workers, and strong policy engagement backed by evidence.

The longer-term vision extends beyond schistosomiasis.

If successfully embedded into Ghana’s health infrastructure and adapted for other neglected tropical diseases, MedScaleApp could become a standard tool for managing community-level health campaigns.

“Success would mean the app is used across all endemic districts in Ghana and expanded to other diseases,” Kye-Duodu said. “Ultimately, it should become part of routine public health practice.”

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Published on 16 April 2026

Written by Jackie Opara-Fatoye.