Indoor residual spraying (IRS) is a critical but expensive intervention to reduce malaria burden, and thus must be deployed and monitored
judiciously. While IRS has been a malaria prevention practice for many years, there are some shortcomings. IRS coverage is measured as a
percentage; the number of houses sprayed relative to the number of houses found. However, this assumes that 100% of the houses in a
particular area are found, and of these, at least 85% are sprayed in order to achieve a protective effect (WHO, 2013). However, Akros data
suggests that on average 40% of structures are missed simply because they have not been found. Zambia, and many other countries in the
region, do not have an address system. In rural areas road names do not exist, and most structures are on traditional land and not registered. Not
being able to find all structures leads to considerable overestimations of IRS coverage, due to “bad” or inaccurate denominators (Larsen, 2017).
Through the availability of satellite data through Bing and Google, and mapping platforms like OpenStreetMap (OSM), enumerations down to
the household level can finally take place without the need to buy expensive imagery. However, to date, the enumerated vector data has not
effectively found its way into a field tool that can update this data set and can inform both the field staff and the coordinating staff with near
real time intervention progress. mSpray is a software tool designed to address this gap. In collaboration with Ona Labs, Akros developed
mSpray, an open-source, tablet-based, GPS-enabled field management tool that uses remote sensing technology to support indoor residual
spraying, with the capacity for expansion to monitor nearly any household-level intervention.