AlafiaComm: Benin's Community Health Platform on CommCare

AlafiaComm is the name Benin gave its community health system, built on CommCare. It began as a tool for safer pregnancies and healthier children, and over the past decade the same platform has been put to work for Ebola contact tracing and national vaccination campaigns. It is a useful picture of how one frontline platform can grow with a country’s needs.

Born out of the ANCRE program

AlafiaComm grew out of ANCRE (Advancing Newborn, Child, and Reproductive Health), a program funded by USAID’s Integrated Family Health Program in Benin and implemented by University Research Co. (URC) together with Dimagi and Results for Development, in support of the Ministry of Health.

In 2015, ANCRE introduced CommCare to strengthen community health workers in two health zones, then adapted it to add community-level malaria services in a deployment the team named AlafiaComm. The aim was practical: help frontline workers deliver the government’s Package of High-Impact Interventions for newborn, child, and reproductive health, and capture what they did along the way.

Built to work offline in low-connectivity settings, the app was as much a job aid as a data tool. Community health workers used it during home visits to register and follow clients, with optional audio, image, and video prompts in local languages to guide their work and educate the families they served.

The gains were measurable. The active management of the third stage of labor, a key practice for preventing maternal hemorrhage, rose from 54% of deliveries in 2015 to 83% in 2018. Over the life of the program, ANCRE trained 56 community-based organizations and nearly 2,000 community health workers.

From Ebola response to national campaigns

Because AlafiaComm runs on a flexible, no-code platform, Benin has been able to point it at new problems without rebuilding from scratch. Through the ANCRE program, which ran until 2018, it supported integrated community case management of childhood illness, family planning, and stock management, and during the West Africa Ebola crisis it was used for Ebola contact tracing. More than 5,000 children were registered and treated.

It has also become a tool for mass vaccination. In June 2025, during Africa Vaccination Week, health teams across all twelve of Benin’s departments used CommCare to register vaccination teams, record their daily work, and track attendance for a campaign to protect more than 4 million children under the age of five. You can read more about how CommCare supports this kind of work in our look at digital public health campaigns.

A national community health system

Today AlafiaComm is Benin’s national community health system, run by the Ministry of Health together with the Ministry of Digital Affairs and Digitalization. Community health agents carry tablets into the households they serve and record what they find during each visit: who they saw, what symptoms were present, which cases need a referral to a health facility. Instead of paper registers that take weeks to reach a district office, the data is captured once and shared.

That gives each agent a clearer, guided record of the households in their care, and it gives the government a view of community health that is current rather than months out of date.

Built to be interoperable and government-owned

AlafiaComm is part of a broader plan to modernize community health in Benin under the country’s National Community Health Policy. The roadmap calls for the platform to interoperate with DHIS2, the national health information system, and to digitize payments to community agents through CommCare, so that the people doing the work are paid reliably and the data they generate flows into the systems ministries already use.

That emphasis on interoperability and ownership matters. It means Benin is not building a walled-off pilot, but a national system its own teams can run, connect, and sustain.