My Village is My Home: Community Tool for Immunization Self-Monitoring and Health Education

This resource is a community self-monitoring tool designed for community workers to use for the purposes of an annual village head count of infants, particularly newborns, as an aid in tracking their vaccination status. It is a drawing of a house in which each infant’s name is placed on a line that represents a plank of a house, starting at the bottom with older infants and "raising” the wall of the house using a line for the name of each infant until the newest infant's name is at the top. Planks are added as blank lines for the newborns of the future 12-month period. Once a roof is drawn, the house is hung on the wall of the health post where immunisation takes place. The names are checked against the post's birth register. Each infant with a completed third dose of the diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus vaccination (DPT3) is marked by colouring in his/her plank.

Instructions include congratulating parents when their child's vaccinations appear complete on the village poster, and reminding parents whose children are not yet finished with the vaccination series to visit the health post. A new record is made each year, and the old ones are kept as examples to show the village's degree of success.