How Lafiya delivers and scales access to reproductive healthcare in Nigeria using SurveyCTO
Meet Lafiya
Lafiya is a nonprofit organization delivering high-quality family planning products and counseling to women in remote, underserved regions across six states in Nigeria. To bridge critical gaps in the formal healthcare system, Lafiya trains and equips a network of 600 community-based health workers, nurses, and midwives—known as Lafiya Sisters—to conduct localized outreach and distribute essential contraceptives like DMPA-SC.
Powered by SurveyCTO on mobile devices, the organization collects and analyzes data from over 100,000 surveys monthly, relying on real-time field data collection, custom field logic, and automated session duration metadata to ensure strict data quality, monitor patient outcomes, and inform national health procurement systems.
Organization: Lafiya
Sector: Reproductive Health & Community Healthcare
Location: Nigeria (operating across 6 states)
Scale: 600 trained healthcare workers (Lafiya Sisters), submitting 100,000+ surveys monthly
Key SurveyCTO features and functionality used: Mobile data collection, survey metadata tracking, geolocation tagging, data validation workflows, real-time dashboard exports, built-in prompts for structured counseling
The Challenge: Family planning access in rural Nigeria
Across rural Nigeria, women in hard-to-reach areas face significant difficulties when it comes to accessing essential reproductive and family planning healthcare. While reliable contraception and quality reproductive healthcare are available to women in Nigeria, limits to access in remote communities affects millions of women.
The Nigerian Ministry of Health has been working to combat this lack of access for some time, making positive strides towards extending contraception supply chains to hard-to-reach areas. Still, the healthcare structures available in these communities are not adequate to meet demand—and that’s where Lafiya comes in.
Lafiya’s mission is straightforward but difficult: Solve the family planning gap through both data and delivery.
When it comes to healthcare delivery, Lafiya trains and deploys an ever-growing network of 600 community health workers (CHWs), midwives, and nurses, which are known as Lafiya Sisters, across rural areas in six states in Nigeria. The Lafiya Sisters deliver in-person reproductive health counseling, and distribute contraceptives like the self-injectable DMPA-SC to women in these communities.
The data aspect of Lafiya’s work involves first identifying communities that exist in this healthcare gap, and sharing that with health authorities in Nigeria. Since healthcare services don’t reach far into rural communities, the government has limited visibility into how many women need and cannot access reproductive healthcare. Lafiya works with the Nigerian government by collecting and providing information on demand for contraception and reproductive care in remote areas.
To get this data, Lafiya runs over 100,000 surveys every month. This entails high-volume field operations that require well-organized data collection processes, strict data monitoring, and operating in thousands of remote, low-resource communities. It also requires reconciling high-quality digital field data with traditional paper-based government registries (DHIS2 and NHLMIS), which ensures that community-level service records accurately inform national procurement systems and government forecasting for family planning services.
This complex data work, plus the logistics involved in delivering contraceptive care, needed data collection software that offered more than simple surveys and basic quality controls.
The Solution: A SurveyCTO-based data ecosystem
As an organization whose mission is deeply rooted in data, Lafiya chose SurveyCTO for its power, flexibility, and ability to meet multiple data needs and have been using the platform since 2022. With SurveyCTO, they conduct household and community surveys to track contraception counseling sessions, capture demographic data, and measure outcomes.
Key SurveyCTO features and functionality that operations depend on include:
- Offline surveys: As an offline-optimized platform, SurveyCTO lets you store form data on local devices and sync to your account in the cloud when wifi is available. This ensures reliable form submission in remote areas with limited internet connectivity.
- Metadata of form duration: SurveyCTO’s quality controls include the ability to track how long counseling sessions or survey interviews last, helping to detect rapid entries or falsified data. When irregularities are detected, Lafiya is able to provide targeted mentoring to Lafiya Sisters or intervene as needed to ensure programs continue to operate at scale without compromising data integrity.
- User friendly mobile data collection app: SurveyCTO’s Collect app is used by Lafiya Sisters in the field, capturing detailed records during counseling sessions, and logging contraceptive history and methods selected. This provides data that can be synced as needed with data from the Nigerian National Ministry of Health, and streamlines future distribution of contraception.
- Geolocation data collection: SurveyCTO has advanced capabilities for capturing geolocation data, like GPS points, which helps Lafiya visualize where the demand for family planning actually is.
To maintain high data integrity across tens of thousands of monthly submissions, Lafiya’s monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) team integrates the standardized data stream from SurveyCTO directly into monthly analytics dashboards. This steady stream of up-to-date field data lets leadership track performance, coordinate commodity forecasting with the Nigerian National Ministry of Health, and create a trusted empirical foundation for scaling community reproductive healthcare across the country.
The SurveyCTO surveys also serve another function: As a counseling tool.
The questionnaire prompts the Lafiya Sisters through a fixed, structured counselling sequence that includes:
- Client intake and consent
- An open conversation covering reproductive goals
- Prior methods used
- Any fears or misconceptions about family planning
- A medical eligibility check (blood pressure, pregnancy status, and contraindications such as prior stroke or uncontrolled hypertension)
- A side-effects counselling script
- A follow-up stage where clients can opt into an SMS or voice reminder for their re-injection date.
The structured prompts adapt to the client’s own earlier answers, so a first-time user is guided through a more foundational conversation than a returning client asking about re-injection. This structure also improves the quality of counselling itself: a Lafiya Sister does not have to rely on memory to cover every method, contraindication, and question a client might have, so nothing important gets skipped or forgotten.
The Results
Using SurveyCTO, Lafiya has expanded almost 50x from a 12-person pilot in 2022 to a network of 600 active Lafiya Sisters logging over 100,000 surveys per month. Areas where Lafiya works have seen a 72% uptake in contraceptive coverage, versus only 34% in control areas as demonstrated during an 18-month longitudinal study.
So far In 2026, Lafiya has conducted over 684,000 counselling sessions with SurveyCTO and delivered over 1.1 million contraceptive doses.
The Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, the primary federal agency responsible for formulating national health policies, regulating healthcare delivery, and advancing social welfare nationwide, is also working with Lafiya on an exciting new development. Currently, the Ministry is in the process of creating a national electronic family planning tool, and is looking to Lafiya’s consultative and operational expertise as well as their SurveyCTO-based model as a best-in-class reference. Lafiya is actively facilitating discussions with the health ministry and key stakeholders, leveraging their experience to help design a national system that will bring vital contraceptive care to even more women and girls across the country.
