Mobile health service as an alternative modality for hard-to-reach pastoralist communities of Afar and Somali regions in Ethiopia

Pastoralism

Research, Policy and Practice

Table 1 Summary of facilitators and barriers for implementing mobile health services in the study area of Somali and Afar regions

Themes/categories	Supply side: health systems and macro level	Community level and environmental factors	Individual-level factors
Reach	Expansion in health centres and health services coverage	Understanding the benefits of health services	Cooperative religious figures
	Continuous awareness creation programme	Community participation and engagement
	Improvement in the number of health professionals
	Incentives to the health professionals
	Increment in hours of health services delivery operations
	Improvements in medical equipment and supplies
	Transportation services
	Collaboration of the regional health bureau with different partners
	Supportive supervision and accountability	Awareness of communities
	Supportive supervision and accountability	Mobilizing capacity of kebele leaders
	Road accesses
Adoption	Ownership by the government		Lack of local language knowledge by health professionals
	Availability of guideline
	Use of health care providers in rotation
Maintenance	Strategy to sustain the MHS
	Budget and logistics
	District annual health plan should include Hard-to-reach communities	Community feedback, empower the community to ask for their right