Many of the development solutions requested by our clients stem in part from a specific or pervasive institutional weakness – it may be that a poor health system is contributing to avoidable maternal deaths; it could be that the lack of effective ministry capacity has resulted in untrained, under supported and unpaid or absentee civil servants, teachers, doctors etc.
As part of our context appropriate solutions, a number of our projects look not only at the immediate development challenge (for instance poor literacy levels in a rural area, or high levels of malaria within extractive industry workers), but at the broader systems issue. As a result we have supported sustainable institutional strengthening across a range of public and private sector stakeholders.
Examples of the services that we provide include:
- Bespoke capacity development programmes – this ranges from organisational staff training on HSSE, to ministry workers training on health data monitoring;
- Systems review to identify and address weaknesses between the stakeholder’s goal and the existing system;
- One to one support to national and sub-national ministries around planning, supervision, organisational design, etc.
- Health / Education Management Information Systems – training, tools and process set up, supervision, interventions to increase the use of information for action
Some of the services have been particularly key for the roll out of the Northern Uganda Health programme in which the project provided direct support at district level (including secondees to the district team, annual planning support, joint health facility supervision, capacity strengthening planning etc). A similar exercise has been key in the Health Pooled Fund which sees the delivery of health systems support across South Sudan, working particularly to support the links between national policy, and county level implementation. Broader systems support has been achieved through research which helps stakeholders with the identification of both systems weaknesses and ‘best practice’ examples; for instance supporting DFID with a thorough value for money and impact evaluation of text book provisioning in South Sudan.
Click here for examples of our work in institutional strengthening or alternatively click here to view all projects.
