Benase Triase gets up at 4:30 in the morning, every day.

He would like to sleep in a little longer before starting his day as a Health Surveillance Assistant in the southern African country of Malawi, but he can’t. Mothers are queuing up outside his small house and banging on the door. Their children are sick, and they want him to diagnose and treat them early enough so that they can get to their fields and start their agricultural work at sunrise. Healthy kids are a priority, but so is providing food for the family, and in Malawi, both are women’s work.

Benase struggles out of bed and unlocks a heavy wooden box, which contains the tools of his “Village Clinic”: medicines, simple diagnostic equipment, and a lot of forms. One of the medicines in his box is a simple antibiotic that cures pneumonia for less than $0.20 a course.

Five years ago, in 2006, it was difficult for mothers of children with severe respiratory distress to get the right treatment. Although Benase’s village is only a few miles from the nearest health facility, the shortest way between the two passes is over a hill infested with hyenas, and mothers are not willing to take the risk of walking there alone. Instead, they would have to take the long route around the hill, three hours in each direction.

Things have improved considerably since the government of Malawi decided to make “Village Clinics” available in all hard-to-reach areas of the country; the proportion of children with suspect pneumonia who see an appropriate provider has increased with this change from roughly one half to two thirds. Independent evaluation surveys have shown that short-trained workers like Benase are remarkably good at following clinical, step-by-step instructions, so that, for a limited number of conditions, they can provide care of a quality that is comparable to more established health centers with fully trained medical healthcare providers.

At least ten African countries are now mobilizing workers based in isolated villages to provide treatment for children who are likely to have pneumonia. All of these countries struggle with similar challenges: organizing effective training for large numbers of workers, many of whom have not spent many years in school; working out how to supervise these workers when district coordinators cover huge areas and may not have a vehicle or fuel to get around, and ensuring that their medicine boxes remain fully stocked.

In Malawi, Benase Triase will soon have a new tool to help him do his job effectively: an app on his mobile phone that will allow him to request more medicines whenever his stock runs low. And the government and its partners are also trying to come up with sustainable solutions to his other perennial problem: a broken bicycle that makes it very difficult for him to meet his supervisor in town or pick up his replacement stock.

Of course, Benase is looking forward to the day when he doesn’t have to treat as many sick children because effective prevention is in place. On World Pneumonia Day this year (Saturday, November 12), Malawi will introduce into its routine immunization schedule the pneumococcal vaccine, which will significantly reduce the burden of mortality from pneumonia. With effective prevention and treatment programs in place, the other hyenas that haunt African villages—pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, and other common diseases of childhood—will no longer seems so terrifying to mothers working in the fields.