Helping The Carter Center tackle lymphatic filariasis in Haiti

For the past two decades, The Carter Center has worked with the Ministry of Health in Haiti to reduce suffering from malaria and lymphatic filariasis. In 2022, the Haiti team engaged with Crosscut to support planning their upcoming campaign to distribute medicines to prevent this dreadful disease.

Over the course of the project, Crosscut conducted 19 weekly microplanning sessions with The Carter Center representatives in Haiti to plan for an upcoming Lymphatic Filariasis campaign. These user-centered design sessions helped guide the development of Crosscut’s geospatial application to the pilot users. The program managers have been pleased with the application and have indicated their desire to use this for future campaigns in Haiti and other countries. The Carter Center users are now using the application independently of Crosscut staff to make modifications to campaign catchment areas and plan campaigns, thus demonstrating no geospatial experts are required to create and modify catchment area maps.

The Crosscut App was able to result in two positive outcomes for The Carter Center:

1. Using the Crosscut App helped the team scrutinize the target population denominator they were using to estimate campaign coverage. Specifically, the team used Crosscut to that the target population for Gressier, one of the two administrative areas targeted by the Carter Center, was twice as large as previously estimated. Based on this discrepancy, the team made the decision to move forward with a full census of the target area in the upcoming campaign. 
2. Having clear catchment areas from Crosscut has enabled The Carter Center to adjust its Haiti campaign strategy from post-based distribution to door-to-door distribution. Prior to using Crosscut, there were no delineations marking where one team’s responsibility began and one team’s ended. The program managers noted that this created cases where some areas between posts were being missed and less ground was being covered by outreach teams than was hoped for. In the next campaign, The Carter Center is instead assigning teams to each of the catchment areas they created with the Crosscut app and passing these catchment area maps out to each team, both in paper form and electronically in tablets being provided to each team.

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