The mHealth Compendium’s fourth volume opens with no preamble about what mobile health is or why it might matter. It goes straight to the case studies: thirty-one of them, each following the same short template of setting, approach, results and lessons learned. That template is the whole point of the document. It is not a research paper arguing that mobile health works. It is a filing cabinet of what has been tried, organized so a program officer in one country can see what a program officer in another country already ran into.
Thirty-one programs, one shared template
Each entry in Volume Four covers a specific mobile-health intervention, mostly but not exclusively in Africa. Some use SMS text reminders to prompt clinic visits during pregnancy. Others route data collected by community health workers back to a district health office over a basic mobile network, replacing a paper form that might otherwise sit in a drawer for weeks. A handful use smartphone apps for outreach workers doing home visits, logging cases as they go rather than transcribing notes later.
The compendium does not attempt to rank these programs against each other, and it makes no claim that any one of them improved health outcomes more than another. That restraint is itself a judgment about the state of the evidence in 2014: mobile health was still young enough that documenting what had been tried was more useful than declaring winners.
A series that kept growing
Volume Four was not a one-off. It sits mid-way through a series that grew steadily. Volume Two, published in 2013, documented twenty-seven case studies. Volume Three followed later that same year. Volume Four, the one covered here, added thirty-one more in October 2014. Volume Five, in 2016, brought forty-one. By the time a “Special Edition: Reaching Scale” appeared, the series as a whole had logged one hundred and sixty-seven separate mHealth program profiles.
That growth curve says something the individual case studies do not: mobile health programming did not slow down after the early pilots. It kept generating new attempts, new countries, new donors, fast enough that a compendium needed a new volume every year or two just to keep up.
The publisher also produced a French-language edition of Volume Four, hosted on the same site as the English original. That detail is easy to overlook, but it is a real signal about who the compendium was written for: not just English-speaking donor staff in Washington, but francophone health ministries and implementing partners across West and Central Africa, reading the same case studies in their own working language.
Built around nine principles
Several of the profiled programs describe themselves as having been built following the Principles for Digital Development, a set of nine widely adopted guidelines for donor-funded digital-health and development projects, covering things like designing with the user in mind, building for sustainability rather than a single grant cycle, and being data-driven rather than assumption-driven. The compendium references this framework repeatedly enough that it functions as a kind of shared vocabulary across the case studies, even though the individual programs otherwise have little in common beyond using a mobile device.
If you are reading this compendium looking for a single fixed methodology, you will not find one. What you find instead is a recurring pattern: identify a target population and a need, pick a mobile channel that fits the setting, pilot it with a small group, collect the resulting data, and check the result against principles like sustainability and scale. Not every case study follows every step, and the compendium does not claim it should.
Dated October 2014, funded by a donor
The cover carries an October 2014 date and a standard USAID disclaimer: the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the U.S. government. That is a funding disclaimer, not a licence statement; no explicit public-domain or open-licence line appears on the pages available for review, so the compendium’s exact rights status is best treated as unresolved rather than assumed.
A later citation of the compendium, in an unrelated National Academies Press chapter about a tool called mHero, gives the publication year as 2015 rather than 2014. The discrepancy is small and unexplained. It could be a citation-year convention, or a different printing run; either way, it is worth flagging rather than quietly resolving one way or the other.
What came after
The series continued past Volume Four. Volume Five arrived in 2016 with forty-one case studies, seven more than this volume documented, and a “Special Edition: Reaching Scale” followed the same year. That later edition is focused specifically on which pilots managed to grow beyond a single district or donor cycle, which is the question Volume Four’s thirty-one case studies mostly leave open. Anyone using this compendium as a planning reference today would do better starting with that later scale-focused edition, since it directly asks what Volume Four does not: which of these mobile-health approaches actually lasted, and which quietly ended when the grant did.
Companion volumes bracket this one on both sides. Volume Two, covering twenty-seven case studies, appeared in 2013; Volume Three followed later that same year. None of the surrounding volumes make Volume Four’s own thirty-one case studies any less specific to the year they were written up in, October 2014, before smartphones were as cheap or mobile data networks as fast as they would become within the decade.