Objective:
The African Strategies for Health (ASH) Project was a five-year contract funded by the United States Agency for International Development/Africa Bureau (USAID/AFR). It was implemented by Management Sciences for Health (MSH) in partnership with three Africa-based partners: African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC), Khulisa Management Services, and Institut pour la Santé et le Développement (ISED) of Dakar University, Senegal.
ASH’s mandate was to assist USAID/AFR to work with African Institutions and other development partners to guide USAID investments for furthering the health of Africans. The ASH project conducted reviews, assessments, and dialogues with partners to improve the understanding of constraints impeding the reaching of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the goals of the Global Health Initiative (GHI).
Approach:
Khulisa provided Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) support to the ASH project and to project beneficiaries Khulisa’s key M&E responsibilities were to develop the M&E Plan, provide M&E and research expertise (including employing an M&E Advisor) across all portfolios of the project, and carry out supplemental M&E related activities for the project.
The M&E advisor sitting on the core ASH management team was a Khulisa employee. In addition, Khulisa provided short-term M&E consultants.
Impact:
During Year 1, Khulisa’s focus was on assisting with the Project Management Plan (PMP), M&E plan, and developing M&E building blocks for ASH activities.
Year 2 saw the beginning of the formative stages of Khulisa’s main contributions to ASH. Khulisa played a key role in conceptualizing and conducting a landscape analysis of health-focused regional organizations. In Year 3, ASH, through Khulisa, worked closely with the African Evaluation Association (AfrEA) supporting the 7th AfrEA International Conference (held March 2014) by organizing, coordinating, managing, and sponsoring the conference’s health strand. Khulisa (i) conceptualized the health strand sessions, (ii) advertised for health strand abstracts, (iii) gathered and selected abstracts (of 325 abstracts submitted for the health strand, 48 abstracts were accepted), (iv) provided technical guidance to evaluators/presenters in preparing their poster and oral presentations, (v) identified and recruited the keynote speaker and key presenters, (vi) assembled and chaired panel discussions to address issues related to health evaluation, and (vii) co-designed and facilitated a knowledge sharing and skills building workshop on “The USAID Evaluation Policy: Quality, Standards, Lessons Learned and Experiences”.
The AfrEA-ASH/Khulisa collaboration continued in Year 4 with the development of a Special Edition of the African Evaluation journal (AEJ) dedicated to “Health-Focused Evaluations in Africa” (http://www.aejonline.org/index.php/aej/issue/view/7). Khulisa worked closely with the AEJ Editor-in-Chief to develop a collection of articles about health evaluations conducted in different regions of Africa, authored by both emerging and seasoned evaluators from Egypt, Nigeria, Guinea, South Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, and Madagascar. Khulisa also provided capacity building to the authors in writing M&E journal articles.
In Year 5, ASH/Khulisa initiated a new collaboration with the Pan African Parliament’s (PAP) Committee on Health, Labor, and Social Affairs as part of the Global Parliamentarians Forum for Evaluation (GPFE) “Parliamentarians for Evaluation” Campaign. Also in Year 5, ASH/Khulisa provided technical support for developing an assessment tool for the “SADC Regional Minimum Standards for HIV and Other Health Services along Transport Corridors” also known as the SADC RMSB. This activity built on earlier ASH support provided to SADC for creating minimum standards for HIV and other health services at the borders of SADC countries that cater to long distance truck drivers and sex workers who often lack access to essential health services from national programs.