Increasing use of information and data

LINK will undertake in-depth engagement in four countries (with a pilot in one additional country) with key personnel from National Malaria Control Programmes (NMCPs) and ministry of health (MoH) departments to determine decision-making processes at different levels of the MoH.  In doing so, LINK aims to encourage NMCP ownership of profiles, work with them and partners to interpret profiles and other data sources and identify political and economic pressures that ‘crowd’ out use of data and evidence. We do this in three ways:

  • having distinct engagement points with NMCPs as described under ‘engagement with decision-makers’
  • undertaking workshops to identify decision-making processes and facilitating peer-to-peer exchanges; and
  • learning through regional-level Communities of Practice (CoP). 

Our extended decision-maker engagement package: This is a complementary piece of work to the three engagement points described above and will be implemented in four countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Malawi and Nigeria. LINK intends to work with NMCPs and MoH heads of departments in these countries to: 

  • identify decision-making pathways, including how teams assess and prioritise evidence and data
  • reflect on how individual roles and reactions facilitate or impede effective data based decision-making
  • develop plans of actions, for individuals and the group as to how to include more data in decision-making processes including epidemiological profiles and routine data. 

In undertaking these workshops we will gain more insight into the political economy of decision-making both at programme and MoH organisational levels. 

Communities of Practice

In 2018, we will launch CoP at regional level to encourage collective learning between countries around the use of routine data for decision-making. From discussions with DHIS-2 colleagues at Health Information Systems Programme (HISP), we understand that very few countries have reached the stage with DHIS-2 of using data for decision-making i.e. taking actions to improve programmes or target interventions using routine data. 

Our aim for the CoP is to bring together programme managers and M&E/HMIS MoH personnel from countries with greater and weaker capacity in using DHIS-2 to share ideas on how to best use the system, and what actions can be taken based on DHIS-2 outputs. We aim to collaborate with our WHO AFRO colleagues and HISP in undertaking these CoP and will also use decision-maker engagement tools developed for country level engagement.