Context
In the West African context, it is very common to have polygamous families. The setting we’ve been implementing for projects in the region is to have the man be in 1 household and create a separate household for each of his wives - all of them being at the same level of the CHT hierarchy.
Challenge
From the above description, it is hard for a user to see directly from the app how each polygamous man (Who is the primary contact of 1 household) is linked to all of his wife’s separate households.
One workaround we’ve agreed on with one of our partners is to have the CHWs include in the wife’s household name, the name of their Husband. But this is a manual workaround that can still have challenges because it’s easy to have people with the exact names in some parts of West Africa.
Have you faced similar cases in your projects? How do you resolve it? Do we have options to work around this on the CHT configuration?
@Marina technically it is possible for the husband to be the primary contact of multiple households. That person would still need to have one “parent” (ie household), but that person can be designated as the primary contact for multiple households. This allows users to see the same man on each of the household records. Can you tell us a bit more about the workflow and what ASCs would need/want to know and do?
@micheal, this is great and seems to be a working solution.
Let us see what changes we need to make to our current project household form to make the creation of the primary contact optional. For now, it’s required.
I’ll circle back if necessary.
Thank you!
@Marina Just to be clear, the primary contact in this example is still required, you are just selecting someone outside the household as the primary contact.
Sure @michael , I got you.
In my case, you must create a new primary contact - you don’t have the option to pick an existing contact. This was disabled.
This is currently possible in the CHT. 