A reproductive health voucher is a card that entitles a poor, pregnant woman to subsidized maternity care. These vouchers are used around the world, but do they actually help improve the quality of care? The Population Council's RHVouchers (@RHVouchers) project is evaluating voucher programs in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Bangladesh and Cambodia to find out.

As one could expect, these evaluations are an intensive process of collecting, organizing, cleaning, and analyzing data. The process happens over largely rural areas with vast distances between households and health service providers. In the video below, Population Council researchers, together Marie Stopes Uganda staff show how they are using ODK to streamline the evaluation of voucher programs. The work is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Find out more about RHVouchers at http://www.rhvouchers.org.

We've shipped a bunch of new updates to ODK tools this week. If you are using old versions, make sure to upgrade by going to http://code.google.com/p/opendatakit/downloads/list!

ODK Aggregate 1.0.6 now supports publishing of forms from Build. We've also added support do bulk delete submissions.

ODK Briefcase 1.0.2 and ODK Form Uploader 1.0.2 now work much better when accessing Aggregate through slow internet connections.

ODK Validate 1.6 fixes an issue where the same form would return different errors.

Again, you can find all the new versions at http://code.google.com/p/opendatakit/downloads/list.

Jessica Vernon from Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) wrote in to contact@opendatakit.org and shared a blog post highlighting the improvement in their safe water systems that have come from using ODK.

The blog post notes that "the Dispensers for Safe Water (DSW) program at IPA (supported with a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) is improving water quality by providing a point-of-collection Chlorine Dispenser System in western Kenya. Treating drinking water with dilute chlorine solution can cut child diarrhea by 41%, but this fact alone doesn't guarantee impact. Using Open Data Kit, an open source set of data collection and management tools, DSW can significantly shorten the feedback loop from data collection to course-correction, allowing us to identify challenges with real-time data and address issues at a rapid pace. Surveys are built in Excel, uploaded to a server and downloaded to a low-cost smartphone.

The Chlorine Dispenser System is being scaled up in Kenya, and DSW is committed to applying rigorous evidence to programs. Having real-time data available for decision making helps take the guesswork out of safe water delivery by quickly focusing efforts where they are needed most. In this way, smartphones can help bring us one step closer to providing safe water for all."

It's always exciting to see ODK tools powering decision-making, so congrats to Jessica and the entire IPA team! Find out more about their work at http://www.poverty-action.org.