In the warm afternoon light of Vihiga County, Kenya, the air hums with the joyful sounds of children playing. CHW Shillah Mavindi is wrapping up a long day, her body tired but spirit full. For the last four years, she has been offering care and counsel to the neighbors she now knows well. Her final stop today is a familiar one: the home of four-month-old Damien.

With a wide smile, Shillah cradles the baby in her arms, exchanging easy conversation with his mother, Latisha Ann. Their relationship didn’t begin today but was nurtured over time, starting when Latisha was two months pregnant.

Shillah conducts a postnatal check-up guided by a checklist on her smartphone. She methodically covers Damien’s nutritional needs, his vaccine schedule, and warning signs of illness. “Since I took up the role, I have created a lasting bond with my community, gaining the name ‘daktari’ due to being their first point contact with the health system,” Shillah says.

Yet her journey hasn’t been without its challenges. In the early days, she wrestled with the tedious task of manually recording every interaction. “We routinely entered data in heavy books that we had to carry around in our daily visits that could last at least five hours,” she recalls. The constant risk of damaging or even misplacing paper-based records made an already demanding job even harder.

Today, her work has shifted dramatically thanks to the electronic Community Health Information System (eCHIS). The culmination of over a decade of investments in community health digitization in Kenya, eCHIS was designed to close critical gaps in community health service delivery, enabling CHWs like Shillah to reach more families with better quality care.

“The digital transition has made our work easier. For instance, we are able to track at the touch of a button inefficiencies such as vaccine defaulters that could easily be missed, making them now a thing of the past,” she says.