Do Primary Health Care Facilities Supported by Development Partners Do Any Better in M&E?

For a conference on “Partnering for Success: How M&E Can Strengthen Partnerships for Sustainable Development,” MEASURE Evaluation–Strategic Information for South Africa authors Anzél Schönfeldt and Nosipho Mbanjwa, with Tsholofelo Andalakan, Head of M&E, Gauteng Province Department of Health, will present their paper, “Do Primary Health Care Facilities Supported by Development Partners Do Any Better in M&E?” at the conference in Wageningen, The Netherlands, March 17-18.

To improve monitoring and evaluation (M&E) at sub-district and primary health care levels, the Gauteng Department of Health partnered with various development organizations already working at district level. The need to harmonise government partnership with development partners stemmed from a myriad of challenges, including limited systematic measurement of efforts and accountability by partner organisations in the areas of M&E or areas of information use. To address the aforementioned challenges, the department outlined the kind of support it required to affect use of strategic information at the service delivery level, as well as to improve on the integrity of performance information.

This paper shares experiences from both the department and a development partner, the USAID- and PEPFAR South Africa-funded MEASURE Evaluation-SIFSA Project, whose collaboration is making headway in improving M&E, data quality, and use of information at various levels of the data management system. A public health facility baseline evaluation, which forms part of this partnership, is currently underway and preliminary findings on the effectiveness of the partnership model will be presented. 

Additionally, this paper aims to explore some of the emerging outcomes of overall partner collaboration and also aims to determine the differences that exists between public health facilities that are supported by development partners versus those without partner organisation support. Facility results derived from routine public health information data will be compared in terms of the partner support received versus health outputs and outcomes.

With this work, we aim to highlight the successes that can be derived from maximising the use of M&E in improving health systems management through partnerships and some of the pertinent mechanisms that the public sector and development partners still need to improve to ensure that results of the M&E efforts are realised, leading to stronger accountability and better governance.