Reporta Health: a mobile social innovation for crowdsourcing data on illegal health facilities in Nigeria

© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Reuse permitted under CC BYNC. No commercial reuse. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. INTRODUCTION The WHO advocates for countries to develop Master Facility Lists (MFL) to provide authoritative lists of legal health facilities in each country. Nigeria has developed its MFL and established a Health Facility Registry (HFR) to actively manage this list. Despite this effort, there are still several unregistered or illegally operating health facilities across the country. Between January and June 2019, not fewer than four state governments identified and shut several illegally operating health facilities within their territories. The problem of illegal health facilities remains a pressing issue due to their relatively large number and limited resources to track them. Only 13.4% (2565 out of 20 642) of the patent and proprietary medicine vendor shops surveyed in an earlier study were registered with the regulatory agency. The risks are that many of these illegal health facilities may be providing suboptimal services to their clients such as inappropriate use of antibiotics, abuse of drugs and suboptimal quality of care. Nigeria is a vast country with limited human and financial resources to police for illegal health facilities. Providing an opportunity for the general population to report unregistered health facilities around them could help in prompt detection of these illegal health facilities. When the public are also able to verify duly registered health facilities, they are more likely to access services there. However, engaging the public to report illegal health facilities has been fraught with challenges. The current practice by a regulator requires complainants to visit the regulator (situated in the state capital) and complete a form. In doing so, the complainant must provide his or her name and contact information. A senior regulatory officer recounted (during an engagement session) that moles within the regulator often reveal to proprietors of illegal health facilities how they obtained information on their health facilities, leaving the member of the public who volunteered such information at risk of being targeted. Thus, the need to protect whistleblowers calls for innovative approaches and a policy shift. Social innovations leveraging mobile phones provide an opportunity to crowdsource and anonymise reporting of illegal health facilities. To this end, we developed a crowdsourcing mobile app—Reporta WHAT ARE THE NEW FINDINGS?