The AFRO’s Global Health Atlas brings together for analysis and comparison standardised data and statistics for diseases at country, regional, and global levels. The Atlas acknowledges the broad range of determinants that influence patterns of infectious disease transmission. Country fact sheets are available for Mauritius.
Monitoring equity and research policy
Country health fact sheet system 2006: Mauritius
World Health Organisation
Country health fact sheet system 2006: Mozambique
World Health Organisation
The AFRO’s Global Health Atlas brings together for analysis and comparison standardised data and statistics for diseases at country, regional, and global levels. The Atlas acknowledges the broad range of determinants that influence patterns of infectious disease transmission. Country fact sheets are available for Mozambique.
Country health fact sheet system 2006: Namibia
World Health Organisation
The AFRO’s Global Health Atlas brings together for analysis and comparison standardised data and statistics for diseases at country, regional, and global levels. The Atlas acknowledges the broad range of determinants that influence patterns of infectious disease transmission. Country fact sheets are available for Namibia.
Country Review Report 7: Republic of Uganda
African Peer Review Mechanism: 21 August 2009
Since 1986, Uganda has made substantial progress in promoting good governance at the political and economic fronts. It recorded sustained economic growth averaging 6% over the last two decades, moving from recovery and reconstruction toward sustainable growth and poverty reduction. Macroeconomic stability remains a cornerstone of the country’s reform efforts. According to Uganda Official Statistics, the proportion of people living in absolute poverty, declined from 56% to 35% between 1992 and 2005/06, although per capita income gains have been modest because of the country’s high population. Nonetheless, significant challenges persist, and these include the fight against poverty and corruption, the resolution of the conflict in the North and other forces that hamper Uganda’s democratisation and economic development process. They call for a concerted effort from all interested parties across the country. The major challenge ahead consists in sustaining the momentum of the peer review process through the successful implementation of the National Programme of Action (NPOA) emanating from the exercise. The Forum will receive Annual Progress Reports in this regard and maintain sustained interest in the implementation process.
Creating a Knowledge Translation Platform: Nine Lessons from the Zambia Forum for Health Research
Kasonde JM and Campbell S: Health Research Policy and Systems 10(31), 3 October 2012
In this review, the authors discuss nine key lessons documenting the experience of the Zambia Forum for Health Research, primarily to inform and exchange experience with the growing community of African KTPs. This Knowledge Translation Platform (KTP) provided cohesion and leadership for national-level knowledge translation efforts. They found that ZAMFOHR’s success was linked to selecting a multi-stakeholder and multi-sectoral Board of Directors, performing comprehensive situation analyses to understand not only the prevailing research-and-policy dynamics but a precise operational niche, and selecting a leader who bridges the worlds of research and policy. ZAMFOHR also helped build the capacity of both policy-makers and researchers, as well as a database of local evidence and national-level actors, while catalysing work in particular issue areas by identifying leaders from the research community, creating policy-maker demand for research evidence and fostering the next generation by mentoring up-and-coming researchers and policy-makers. Ultimately, ZAMFOHR’s experience shows that an African KTP must pay significant attention to its organisational details and invest in the skill base of the wider community and, more importantly, of its own staff. At the same time, the role of networking cannot be underestimated.
Creating windows of opportunity for policy change: Incorporating evidence into decentralized planning in Kenya
Ashford LS, Smith RR, De Souza RM, Fikree FF, Yinger NV: WHO Bulletin 84, August 2006
Because researchers and policy-makers work in different spheres, policy decisions in the health arena are often not based on available scientific evidence.This paper describes a model that illustrates the policy process and how to work strategically to translate knowledge into policy actions. Activities were undertaken as part of the Kenyan Ministry of Health’s new decentralised planning-process.
Critical Health Perspectives - District Health Barometers: What does it say about promises and practice of PHC?
Myburgh N, Solanki G: People's Health Movement, 28 March 2007
The Health Systems Trust recently published the second South African District Health Barometer (DHB II). The report compares the performance on key health indicators for all 53 South African health districts. While the study suffers some limitations of data quality, it nevertheless provides a useful snapshot of health care across the country.
Critical Maternal Health Knowledge Gaps in Low- and Middle-Income Countries for Post-2015: Researchers’ Perspectives
Kendall, T: Paper No. 2. Women and Health Initiative, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: Boston, 2015
Between June and October 2014, the Maternal Health Task Force (MHTF) consulted 26 international maternal health researchers to gather perspectives on the most critical and neglected areas for knowledge generation to improve maternal health in low- and middle-income countries. The MHTF asked respondents to identify research and evaluation priorities in three broad areas: 1) persistent and critical knowledge gaps that need to be filled to accelerate reductions in maternal mortality and morbidity in low-and middle income countries; 2) crucial maternal health issues that have not been given adequate attention by research and donor communities; and 3) new situations and emerging challenges that require research to improve maternal health outcomes. The report presents the results of the interview responses on issues that will shape the landscape of maternal health over the next decade. This included strengthening health service delivery; improving distribution and retention of healthcare workers; the increasing burden of non-communicable diseases among pregnant women and women of reproductive age; the persistence of social and economic inequality and vulnerability; and urbanization. The need to attend to geopolitical determinants of maternal health, such as climate change and food insecurity, the proliferation of conflict and humanitarian crises, and the rise of religious fundamentalism, was also mentioned.
Cross-community comparability of attitude questions: An application of item response theory
Tfaily R: International Journal of Social Research Methodology 1464(5300), 8 June 2009
The use of attitude questions is very common in comparative surveys as it allows researchers to gauge the perspectives of respondents toward social issues and explain cross-country differentials in attitudes. Comparative studies implicitly assume that equivalently worded items are measuring the same construct in different settings. However, the results of these studies might be questionable if the measurement invariant assumption is violated and different groups of respondents do not have a shared understanding of the attitude items. This paper uses item response theory to compare the measurement of items and to test whether equivalently worded attitude questions about family dissolution are understood in the same way across various communities in India, Malaysia, Pakistan and the Philippines. The paper also examines the interaction between the respondent's gender, the sex of the spouse leaving the marriage and the responses to the attitude questions about acceptability of family dissolution.
Data-driven quality improvement in low-and middle-income country health systems: lessons from seven years of implementation experience across Mozambique, Rwanda, and Zambia
Wagenaar B; Hirschhorn L; Henley C; et al: BMC Health Services Research 17 (Suppl 3), doi:10.1186/s12913-017-2661-x, 2017
This paper describes the similar and divergent approaches to increase data-driven quality of care improvements and implementation challenge and opportunities encountered in these three countries. Eight semi-structured in-depth interviews were administered to program staff working in each country. Project successes ranged from over 450 collaborative action-plans developed, implemented, and evaluated in Mozambique, to an increase from 80% of basic clinical protocols followed in intervention facilities in rural Zambia, and a shift from a lack of awareness of health data among health system staff to collaborative ownership of data and using data to drive change in Rwanda. Based on common successes across the country experiences, the authors recommend future data-driven quality improvement interventions begin with data quality assessments to promote that rapid health system improvement is possible, ensure confidence in available data, serve as the first step in data-driven targeted improvements, and improve staff data analysis and visualization skills. They pose that explicit Ministry of Health collaborative engagement can ensure performance review is collaborative and internally-driven rather than viewed as an external “audit.”