CommCare Mobile Workflows for Humanitarian Field Service Delivery Training Course

Course overview

Humanitarian field teams need reliable, accountable ways to register affected households, assess needs, deliver assistance, make referrals, and follow up across unstable connectivity, changing caseloads, and strict data-protection requirements. Paper forms and disconnected spreadsheets create delayed reporting, duplicate records, missed referrals, and weak evidence of who received which service. This course equips practitioners to design CommCare mobile workflows that reflect real field operating procedures while producing usable, auditable programme data.

Participants learn to configure CommCare applications for humanitarian response scenarios, including rapid needs assessments, beneficiary registration, vulnerability scoring, case management, distribution monitoring, protection referrals, and post-distribution follow-up. They build mobile forms using question logic, validation rules, repeat groups, multimedia prompts, lookup tables, case properties, and conditional pathways. The course also covers user roles, mobile worker groups, offline data collection, data exports, dashboard-ready reporting structures, and practical controls for collecting sensitive personal data.

Teaching combines instructor demonstrations in CommCare HQ, guided form-building labs, field-service case studies, peer design reviews, and troubleshooting exercises based on common deployment failures. Participants work through a humanitarian response scenario from service blueprint to mobile workflow and leave with a configured CommCare application prototype, form specifications, case-management design, user-access plan, and rollout checklist that can be adapted for their organisation.

The course is designed for programme, MEAL, digital, information-management, and field operations professionals who already understand humanitarian programme delivery and need to translate service processes into robust mobile workflows.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Map a humanitarian service pathway into CommCare forms, cases, users, and data flows
• Build mobile data-collection forms with skip logic, validation constraints, repeat groups, and required-response rules
• Configure CommCare case management for household registration, referrals, follow-up visits, and service-status tracking
• Design vulnerability-scoring and eligibility workflows using calculated values, lookup tables, and conditional logic
• Set up mobile worker groups, user roles, case sharing, and access controls for field deployment
• Prepare offline-ready CommCare Mobile workflows with multimedia guidance and field-friendly form navigation
• Export and structure programme data for quality checks, operational reporting, and DHIS2-ready aggregation
• Produce a tested CommCare application prototype and implementation rollout checklist for a humanitarian use case

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Humanitarian Programme Managers — who need field workflows that link service delivery, accountability, and reporting
• MEAL Officers — who design monitoring tools and need higher-quality, traceable mobile data
• Information Management Officers — who configure data flows, user access, exports, and reporting structures
• Digital Transformation Leads — who select and govern mobile platforms for humanitarian operations
• Field Coordinators — who supervise enumerators and require practical workflows that function offline
• Protection and Case Management Officers — who need controlled referral and follow-up processes for sensitive cases

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have practical experience with humanitarian programme delivery, beneficiary registration, needs assessment, distributions, referrals, monitoring, or case management. They should be comfortable working with structured data in Microsoft Excel, including rows, columns, filters, and basic data cleaning. Familiarity with mobile data collection concepts such as forms, questions, validation, and enumerator workflows is helpful. Prior CommCare experience is not required, and participants do not need programming, SQL, API development, or advanced database skills. A laptop and access to a current web browser are required for the hands-on configuration work.

Training methodology

The course is delivered through short instructor-led configuration sessions followed by guided work in CommCare HQ. Participants build and test forms on CommCare Mobile, using a shared humanitarian response case that develops from rapid assessment through registration, eligibility, referral, and follow-up. Small groups review workflow maps, identify data-protection risks, and test each other’s applications against field scenarios such as interrupted connectivity and duplicate registrations. The final session uses an application clinic and implementation-planning workshop to convert each prototype into a deployment-ready action plan.

Course outline

Day 1: Designing humanitarian mobile service workflows

• Humanitarian service-delivery journeys and mobile workflow boundaries
• CommCare HQ application architecture and project-space navigation
• Workflow mapping from SOPs to forms, cases, users, and reports
• Household, individual, and service-event data models
• Data minimisation and informed-consent design for beneficiary records
• Offline-first operating assumptions for remote field locations
• Form specification templates and field question inventories

Workshop: Participants map a rapid-assessment and household-registration process into a CommCare workflow blueprint with actors, decisions, data fields, and handoffs.

Day 2: Building robust CommCare mobile forms

• Form Builder navigation and question-type selection
• Relevance conditions and skip logic for adaptive interviews
• Validation constraints, required fields, and error-message design
• Calculated values for ages, scores, dates, and derived indicators
• Repeat groups for household members, items, and multiple referrals
• Choice lists, lookup tables, and controlled response values
• Multimedia prompts and field-worker guidance in CommCare Mobile

Workshop: Participants build and mobile-test a rapid needs assessment form with conditional sections, repeat groups, validation rules, and a vulnerability score.

Day 3: Case management, referrals, and follow-up

• CommCare case lifecycle concepts and case-property design
• Creating and updating household and individual cases
• Case search, case lists, and follow-up form workflows
• Parent-child cases for households and household members
• Referral pathways, service-status fields, and closure rules
• Case sharing across teams and operational handover points
• Duplicate-registration prevention and identity-verification approaches

Workshop: Participants configure a registration-to-referral workflow that creates household cases, tracks service status, and schedules a follow-up visit.

Day 4: Field deployment, governance, and reporting readiness

• Mobile worker accounts, roles, and group-based access
• Application deployment settings and version-release controls
• Offline sync behaviour and device-level field testing
• Sensitive-data handling, role restrictions, and retention decisions
• Data quality rules for completeness, consistency, and timeliness
• CommCare data exports and Microsoft Excel quality-check routines
• Preparing indicator structures for DHIS2 aggregation and reporting

Workshop: Participants create a user-access matrix, test an offline workflow on CommCare Mobile, and run a structured data-quality review on exported records.

Day 5: Testing and operationalising the CommCare application

• Scenario-based user acceptance testing for humanitarian workflows
• Test scripts for registration, referral, follow-up, and case closure
• Finding and correcting form, case, and user-permission defects
• Enumerator onboarding materials and supervisor support processes
• Pilot design, feedback collection, and controlled application revision
• Deployment risk register for connectivity, devices, safeguarding, and data loss
• Implementation roadmap, ownership model, and success measures

Workshop: Participants present a tested CommCare application prototype and produce a pilot rollout checklist, risk register, and 30-day implementation plan.

Tools & standards covered

CommCare HQ, CommCare Mobile, Microsoft Excel, DHIS2

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions