Swaziland

Voices From The Capacity Project: Linking Up—Creating a Complete Picture of Swaziland’s Health Workforce

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 13:13:41 +0000

Voices From The Capacity Project: Linking Up—Creating a Complete Picture of Swaziland’s Health Workforce Anonymous (not verified) September 14, 2016

February 19, 2008

In Swaziland, a dwindling health workforce has been dealing with a heavy patient workload, providing care to the country’s high number of HIV-affected citizens and delivering services to meet other pressing needs. Health professionals have watched many of their colleagues move away from the public sector or migrate in search of better opportunities.

To address these challenges, the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MOHSW) urgently needed more information about its valuable human resources for health. “We didn’t know who was working where,” says Thembisile Khumalo, chief nursing officer at the MOHSW. No one had a complete picture of the number of staffed workers, their locations or the number of open positions.

Swaziland’s health sector includes government facilities as well as independent mission and private-sector hospitals and clinics. An existing Public Service database held records for MOHSW staff but did not include non-Ministry staff. Data accuracy was unreliable, and information was not being shared among decision-makers. Complicating matters, some former employees were never taken off the payroll and became "ghost workers," continuing to receive paychecks.

The Capacity Project worked with senior leaders of the MOHSW to develop a program of assistance. Strengthening the country’s human resources information systems (HRIS) quickly became a priority.

Following an assessment of the existing system, the Project organized the Swaziland HRIS Stakeholder Group. Members developed policy questions to determine the types of data and HRIS reports needed to produce the answers they sought. The top-priority policy questions addressed deployment, the incoming workforce, training, attrition and retention.

To get started and verify the existing HR data, Khumalo explains that the team “printed out the information for each department, for each facility. We sent them the information to check if it is correct for each health worker. So they submitted it back and we corrected the information.”

Next, Khumalo continues, “we developed the HRIS for the health sector. It includes the public service, the NGOs, missions and the private units—all the health workers. We have all their information. Also, we are able to trace all those people who have already left the Ministry. We found people who remained in the payroll for some time, as ghost workers, and we saved the money.”

Initial reports generated from the HRIS provided valuable input. The Lubombo Regional Health Management Team, for example, “said they'd had no idea about how heavily dependent their region was on mission nurses,” recalls Samuel Johnson, monitoring and evaluation advisor at the MOHSW. “They were very surprised to find that their ratio of nurses to population was the second highest in Swaziland. They were also shocked to discover a number of vacant posts that had slipped through the system and remained unfilled for years.”

At the MOHSW, staff used the new, accurate data to develop a Health Workforce Strategic Plan, analyze vacancies and fill gaps. Data are also being used to identify bottlenecks in the hiring process and deploy workers more efficiently.

The ultimate goal is to get the data into a complete system that links with other agencies. Khumalo notes that “we are intending to link the HRIS with the nursing council,” which holds detailed data from the private sector as well as the public sector. “The whole health system is to be linked together.”

The Capacity Project’s activities in Swaziland are continuing through the Southern Africa Human Capacity Development Coalition, a Capacity Project Associate Award led by IntraHealth International. An upcoming workshop on using data for decision-making will help leaders make the best use of their new system. “Now, with the information we have, we can tell who is working where,” says Khumalo. “It is helping us a lot in planning for the sector.”

[January 2008. To learn more about HRIS, see HRIS Strengthening.]

The Capacity Project, funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented by IntraHealth International and partners (IMA, JHPIEGO, LATH, MSH, PATH, TRG), helps developing countries strengthen human resources for health to better respond to the challenges of implementing and sustaining quality health programs.

Swaziland

Voices from the Field: Swaziland Program Develops Leadership, Improves Health Care Facilities

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 13:13:41 +0000

Voices from the Field: Swaziland Program Develops Leadership, Improves Health Care Facilities Anonymous (not verified) September 14, 2016

March 08, 2008

“The Leadership Development Program has taught us shared vision, collaborative approach and enhanced team spirit. Teamwork has replaced the historical differences between the hospital administrator, the matron and the medical superintendent, and we all work to achieve results,” says Leonard Dlamini, hospital administrator at Raleigh Fitkin Memorial (RFM) in Swaziland.

The leadership program is part of the IntraHealth International-led Southern African Human Capacity Development Coalition (SAHCD), whose work is funded by USAID through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Coalition partner Management Sciences for Health (MSH) trained Dlamini and four others in leadership development facilitation to tackle some of the issues challenging the country’s health care system. The newly trained facilitators then led 36 health workers, mainly hospital managers, from six Swazi health care facilities through four leadership workshops with additional coaching in between workshops. At the end of the six-month course, participants presented results of real challenges they had addressed in their hospitals.

Dlamini, with RFM for 22 years, is now a champion of the Leadership Development Program (LDP). “LDP has strengthened my professional life. . . . It has assisted me in not seeing myself as an island but as one of the players working towards the overall problem solving in the health sector,” remarks Dlamini.

Another facilitator—Mavis Nxumalo, deputy chief nursing officer with Swaziland’s Ministry of Health and Social Welfare—echoes Dlamini’s enthusiasm. “Through LDP, you can now bring together in one room doctors, nurses and administrators who will work together to solve one problem,” she says.

During the LDP, Dlamini’s RFM team focused on improving patients’ assessment of the outpatient department (OPD). Realizing they needed patient feedback, the team members developed:

Policies and guidelines for patient assessment
New assessment and follow-up sheet for the OPD
Twelve suggestion boxes
Patient’s information leaflet
Client satisfaction survey
Monthly audit system.

Dlamini reports that because of the LDP, attendance in the OPD has gone up from an average of 300 people to 450 per day.

“[T]he hospital has become a best practice on how to work with the public so that they can give feedback to a health facility,” notes Nxumalo.

RFM is not the only facility to see success: “Ward 12 at Mbabane Hospital was so dilapidated,” says Nxumalo, who is responsible for deploying nurses to hospitals across the country.

“Through resource mobilization, the LDP participants have restored it by repairing the leaking roof, putting in new tiles, painting the ward with bright colors and installing new curtains. This has improved morale among health workers who now don’t mind working in ward 12. It is more relaxed and motivating and a good environment to work in.”

LDP participants identified the following as lessons they learned through the workshops:

Leaders are not born but they can be made.
One should deal with problems that are within one’s scope of influence.
Resistance to change needs to be managed.
A positive and healthy work climate is essential to success.
Group work and team spirit constitute the backbone to achieving results.
The coaching approach is beneficial in between workshops.
One needs to recognize the difference between a challenge and a problem.

“It is clear that these officers have mastered the concept of leading and managing for results. These teams faced challenges and enabled others to face these challenges and achieve results under complex conditions,” says Njabulo Mabuza, minister of health and social welfare. “[T]the LDP team’s success was based on shared vision, commitment to implement resolutions and compete for results. As part of the ongoing search for solutions for the health challenges facing the country, we invite all sectors of the population to contribute towards realization of this goal.”

The SAHCD Coalition is comprised of five organizations besides IntraHealth: Council for Health Service Accreditation of Southern Africa (CoHSASA); Management Sciences for Health (MSH); East, Central and Southern African Health Community (ECSA); Foundation for Professional Development (FPD); and Training Resources Group (TRG) Inc. The Coalition aims to establish a strong coordinated regional response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Southern Africa and to improve the capacity of the public and private sectors to deliver HIV/AIDS services. An associate award of the IntraHealth-led global Capacity Project, the Coalition:

Provides technical assistance in human resources for health planning, policy and advocacy
Contributes to the development of training programs, curricula, standards and policies
Strengthens human resources information and management systems
Builds local capacity in policy development and implementation
Enhances knowledge management and best practices programming.

IntraHealth Voices #6. Swaziland: Program Develops Leadership, Improves Health Care Facilities. March 2008.

Swaziland Primary Health Care Health Workforce & Systems Management and Performance

Voices From The Capacity Project: Strengthening Swaziland's Grant From The Global Fund

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 13:13:41 +0000

Voices From The Capacity Project: Strengthening Swaziland's Grant From The Global Fund Anonymous (not verified) September 14, 2016

April 09, 2008

Swaziland has the world's highest known rate of HIV infection—over 38% in the adult population. Average life expectancy has declined to just 39 years. Orphans are estimated to number almost 70,000, projected to increase to 120,000 by 2010. A vast number of this small country’s households are headed by children living on their own or with a sick parent or relative, unable to provide for their basic needs. With so much at stake, the country is working hard to mobilize all resources.

The National Emergency Response Council on HIV/AIDS (NERCHA) is mandated by the government of Swaziland to facilitate the multisectoral response. “NERCHA is in a pivotal position to coordinate a successful response to the pandemic,” says the Capacity Project’s Jawara Lumumba. Among its duties, the organization serves as the Principal Recipient for Swaziland’s HIV grant from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

NERCHA has been intensifying its focus on being an effective Principal Recipient—that is, receiving the funds and providing oversight and management. By contrast, involvement in the implementation of the grant is the role of other agencies such as the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare. At the same time, NERCHA bears responsibility for coordinating all of Swaziland’s HIV-related efforts. Therefore, the Capacity Project is strengthening NERCHA’s leadership and management capabilities and helping the organization to restructure itself as coordinator rather than implementer of the Global Fund grant.

Building on technical assistance offered throughout 2007, the Project conducted a three-day teambuilding and strategic planning workshop for 25 NERCHA staff in December. Held in the capital of Mbabane, the workshop advanced the teamwork and collaboration of the organization’s Coordination Unit and Technical Support Unit. “The group explored and determined concrete strategies for using their diversity as a valuable resource to strengthen their internal and external collaborative teamwork,” Lumumba explains. “In addition they developed concrete action plans, which will move them successfully from strategic planning to productive strategic action.”

NERCHA staff members were enthusiastic about their progress. “Differences can actually be complementary factors toward success,” realized one workshop participant. “We all have unique views, but if we all are working toward the same goal we can use our differences to come out with gold—a productive explosion coming from our creative use of the differences.”

Another staff member reflected on this theme. “Within a team we have got different characters and need to appreciate the uniqueness because we complement one another. No matter how different your characteristics and personalities are, you can work together as a team and be as effective as ever, as long as we respect and listen to one another.”

Looking ahead, one participant felt “empowered to start the year with a clear plan, and I have energy to work hard to achieve the plan.” Another affirmed that “we have reached some form of consensus on what has to happen” and envisioned greater productivity as a result. One person was “hopeful about more collaboration from team members, more support from other teams and more serious work and results.”

“Unquestionably Swaziland faces the present worst-case HIV/AIDS scenario,” Lumumba acknowledges. “I have been impressed with NERCHA’s open-mindedness and diligence in clarifying its coordination role and developing a strategic management plan. In the end I project that the headline will be: Swaziland wins its war against HIV/AIDS under NERCHA’s coordination.”

In February the Capacity Project supported follow-up activities stemming from the workshop. As a NERCHA staff member put it, they are “very optimistic about the year ahead in terms of working together as a team.” Another added that they are “excited and full of hope that 2008 will be a year in which we will make progress towards strengthening the ability of the office to do what is expected of it—coordinate the national response.”

In addition to Swaziland, the Capacity Project has assisted 13 other countries—Belize, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, El Salvador, Indonesia, Malawi, Mozambique, Nepal, Pakistan, Romania, Senegal, Tanzania and Togo—to improve the functioning of their Global Fund grants.

Swaziland

Voices from the Field: Performance Improvement Workshop Enhances Supervision of Health Workers in Lesotho and Swaziland

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 13:13:41 +0000

Voices from the Field: Performance Improvement Workshop Enhances Supervision of Health Workers in Lesotho and Swaziland Anonymous (not verified) September 14, 2016

July 22, 2008

Influenced by a workshop on strengthening supervisory skills, Nurse Sister Sibongile Khoza now sits down with her subordinates to find the root cause when a difficulty arises: “In one instance, I discovered that burnout was causing a nurse’s negative attitude towards work. Sitting down with her and thrashing out the problem worked.”

Khoza, from Swaziland’s Mbabane Government Hospital, participated in the performance improvement workshop through the IntraHealth-led Southern African Human Capacity Development (SAHCD) Coalition. Matron Meddy Shongwe from the Manzini Regional Health Office—who supervises five nurse sisters—also participated: “The workshop taught me about team work, leadership skills and how to motivate people. I have used it in everyday planning, problem solving, and conflict resolution as well as supportive supervision.”

Strengthening supervision is one strategy to better support Swaziland’s health workers as they deal with the country’s very high rate of HIV infection as well as other urgent health needs amidst a chronic shortage of doctors and nurses.

Another participant who has modified her supervisory approach as a result of the workshop’s lessons is Nurse Matron Mabuza, who works at Pigg’s Peak Government Hospital: “I have used what I learnt from the performance improvement course in my work not to impose on the staff that I supervise.” The course persuaded Mabuza to better listen to her subordinates and include and empower them in the decision-making process, and Mabuza learned to give them space to work out their problems.

After attending the workshop, Mabuza sat with her staff—five nurse sisters, 35 staff nurses, and 23 nurse assistants, auxiliaries and orderlies—and shared her lessons with them. She encouraged them to work well among themselves and listen to one another’s ideas.

To create clearer expectations for her staff, Mabuza has been involved in formulating policies and guidelines for a quality improvement program. “We are putting the policies in writing so that everyone in the department is aware of what they are supposed to do,” she comments.

Initially, working on the policies was challenging for the hospital staff. “At first we felt it was impossible to formulate a policy, until we realized that it is exactly what we are doing everyday,” adds Dr. Ngorima, a physician at Pigg’s Peak hospital.

As interventions like policies are shared with the staff, “the challenge is bringing the staff to the same understanding as everyone who attended the [SAHCD workshop] so that they own the intervention as an improvement to our facility and to our patients,” says Mabuza.

Pigg’s Peak Hospital has benefitted from other improvements because of the SAHCD intervention despite the facility having a shortage of resources. Sister Siphiwe Mahlalela, who is supervised by Matron Mabuza, expressed how the performance improvement workshop, like SAHCD’s other workshops on leadership development and quality assurance, has enhanced teamwork among staff members. “We felt empowered that you can take advantage of the available resources. For example, we had a problem in the kitchen when the contracted company left without notice, and the support staff team helped with the cooking until a replacement was found.”

Staff members have been credited with:

Allocating a room in the outpatient department that is set aside for emergencies. A doctor is now assigned to this room to attend to emergency patients, allowing both emergency and non-emergency patients more privacy.
Moving the location of the x-rays closer to the outpatient department, where they are needed most often
Creating signs that provide directions to the different departments and services offered
Fostering enhanced team spirit among employees
Cleaning up the yard and removing machines that were lying around
Developing hand washing procedures
Fixing the incinerator.

Funded by USAID, the SAHCD Coalition is comprised of five organizations besides IntraHealth: Council for Health Service Accreditation of Southern Africa; Management Sciences for Health; East, Central and Southern African Health Community; Foundation for Professional Development; and Training Resources Group Inc.

The Coalition aims to establish a strong coordinated regional response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Southern Africa and to improve the capacity of the public and private sectors to deliver HIV/AIDS services. An associate award of the IntraHealth-led global Capacity Project, the Coalition:

Provides technical assistance in human resources for health planning, policy and advocacy
Contributes to the development of training programs, curricula, standards and policies
Strengthens human resources information and management systems
Builds local capacity in policy development and implementation
Enhances knowledge management and best practices programming.

Swaziland Solution Areas Policy & Advocacy Management and Performance Health Areas

Voices From The Capacity Project: Drawing On Data—Effective Decision-Making for the Health Workforce

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 13:13:38 +0000

Voices From The Capacity Project: Drawing On Data—Effective Decision-Making for the Health Workforce Anonymous (not verified) September 14, 2016

August 01, 2008

Imagine you’re a health-sector manager faced with competing priorities for your country’s valuable human resources for health (HRH). You need data to help you make the most effective decisions, yet the information you seek is not easy to find—and not always easy to understand. “Often looking at the data, I was not quite sure what to do exactly,” admits one health manager in Swaziland. Another manager laments that trying to gather information “was a nightmare because the data was not readily available, not well analyzed and often wrong.”

The Capacity Project has been helping to strengthen human resources information systems (HRIS) in several African countries, and many of the systems are now able to produce useful reports about the health workforce. “Now we’re in the stage where we should start using [HRH] information for planning, for policy-making, for evidence for decisions,” observes Dr. Eddie Mukooyo, chair of the Uganda Health Workforce Advisory Board. But this hasn’t always been feasible. As one manager confesses, “I did not bother to collect data before but just made requests for posts without [consulting the] database.”

“One of the key challenges that health-sector leaders usually have are issues of decision-making and the lack of accurate, quality data,” says Zanele Dlamini, technical assistant on HIV/AIDS to the Principal Secretary’s Office at the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MOHSW) in Swaziland. Information on the health workforce was unreliable and not shared among decision-makers. To help, the Capacity Project worked with Ministry leaders to strengthen the country’s HRIS and link data from relevant parts of the sector to include all health workers. The next challenge was to help HRH practitioners and policy-makers to put the data into context and inform their decisions.

In February 2008, a three-day workshop in Ezulwini Valley helped 28 managers to understand information available from their HRIS and apply tools for making evidence-based decisions. (The Project’s activities in Swaziland are continuing through the Southern Africa Human Capacity Development Coalition, a Capacity Project Associate Award led by IntraHealth International and funded by USAID through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.) “What I thought was very surprising were the vacancies that were over a year old and those that were due for retirement—[they] are already of their ages and overdue,” Dlamini remarks. “This has financial implications for the Ministry as well as the personnel itself.”

Michael Mndzebele, regional health administrator at the MOHSW, comments that the workshop “brought to the fore how much information we have that we don’t make use of. I will make sure that the data generated in my department is analyzed and made available to me and the rest of the team for our future decision-making.”

This event built on lessons learned from a workshop the Capacity Project led in Uganda in June 2007 for planners and managers from the ministries of health and education and the faith-based sector. It marked the first opportunity for many participants to review reports from the new HRIS at the Nurses and Midwives Council. Dr. Mukooyo recounts that “of those who registered for an examination we were able to note how many were able to pass, how many were able to go on to be licensed and how many eventually were able to be deployed. Then we found that people [from] more rural areas tended to stay longer [in nearby rural posts]. That was good information for us—[we] should allocate more resources for those training schools for people in their own population to train and go on to work in their own areas.”

“It is not enough simply to make data available,” concludes the Project’s Ummuro Adano. “There must be a process in place for analyzing the information and getting it to the right decision-maker or key stakeholder with the power and resources to act on it.” In Uganda, the Project’s Dr. Pamela McQuide points out that “we compared the number of currently registered nurses to what we projected we needed in the Strategic Plan—we are using those numbers for the president’s Master Plan that’s being written, to see how many nurses need to be trained.”

Notes Dlamini, “[This process] is going to be very beneficial for the health sector and beyond the Ministry of Health.”

Swaziland Uganda Leadership and Governance Measurement & Analytics Policy & Advocacy

Voices from the Field: Swaziland And Uganda—Now We Can Tell Who Is Working Where

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 13:13:38 +0000

Voices from the Field: Swaziland And Uganda—Now We Can Tell Who Is Working Where Anonymous (not verified) September 14, 2016

September 23, 2008

Strengthening Human Resources Information Systems

Imagine you oversee the fire department for a vast city, home to millions of people. Houses and apartments catch on fire every day, in the heart of downtown and in the suburbs and outlying areas. You have fire stations with fire trucks, but you are not sure how many firefighters you have in any one fire station—in fact, a few stations have only one or two firefighters but there is no system to tell you that the vacancies need to be filled. Without the essential data on firefighters to plan and sustain a strong fire department, some houses survive, others burn to ashes.

Similarly, without accurate human resources information in the health care world, managers cannot determine where health workers are needed most, and many people can’t access the services and treatment they need. Through its USAID-funded Capacity Project, IntraHealth International is supporting countries to strengthen their human resources information systems (HRIS) and learn how to use data effectively so that human resources for health are better managed and supported.

One example is Swaziland, whose health workforce has been dwindling and overburdened trying to care for the high number of patients with HIV/AIDS. Many health professionals have chosen not to work in the public sector and even left the country in search of better employment opportunities. To respond, the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare needed vital information about its human resources for health. “We didn’t know who was working where,” says Thembisile Khumalo, chief nursing officer at the Ministry.

The Capacity Project organized the Swaziland HRIS Stakeholder Group, which determined the types of data and HRIS reports needed to produce the answers the Ministry sought about deployment, the incoming workforce, training, attrition and retention. The Project developed a new centralized HRIS that includes not only public service records of Ministry staff but also records of private-sector hospitals and clinics and nongovernmental organizations—in other words, of all health workers.

In Uganda, the Capacity Project helped create a Health Workforce Advisory Board to lead the process of developing an HRIS. The Board—comprised of members of the Ministry of Health, the four professional licensing associations, training institutions and nongovernmental organizations—identified the top human resources data needs and came to a consensus on a database for Uganda that would be functional for all parties involved.

After the Advisory Board identified computerization of the Uganda Nurses and Midwives Council’s data as an urgent priority, the Capacity Project improved the Council’s network and infrastructure and installed a certification and licensing information system that tracks all health professionals in Uganda—from pre-service training until they leave the workforce. The Project then led a workshop for planners and managers from the ministries of health and education and the faith-based sector. Participants reviewed reports from the new HRIS at the Council, and explored how to use the data to drive their decision-making.

Dr. Eddie Mukooyo, the Ministry of Health’s assistant commissioner, Resource Center, recounts that “of those who registered for an examination we were able to note how many were able to pass, how many were able to go on to be licensed and how many eventually were able to be deployed. Then we found that people [from] more rural areas tended to stay longer [in nearby rural posts]. That was good information for us—[we] should allocate more resources for those training schools for people in their own population to train and go on to work in their own areas.”

Back in Swaziland, armed with data, the Ministry needed to be trained in the same way as the Project had trained the managers and planners in Uganda. “Often looking at the data, I was not quite sure what to do exactly,” admitted one health manager. A three-day workshop helped 28 managers to better understand information available from their HRIS and apply tools for making evidence-based decisions. As Michael Mndzebele, Ministry regional health administrator, comments, the workshop “brought to the fore how much information we have that we don’t make use of. I will make sure that the data generated in my department is analyzed and made available to me and the rest of the team for our future decision-making.”

“Now, with the information we have, we can tell who is working where,” says Khumalo. “It is helping us a lot in planning for the [health] sector.” The Ministry has used the accurate data to develop a Health Workforce Strategic Plan, analyze vacancies and hire and deploy workers more efficiently.

IntraHealth’s HRIS strengthening process includes five key elements:

Building HRIS leadership using a participatory approach that also includes assessing any related systems currently in use
Strengthening needed infrastructure to support an HRIS
Developing free, open source HRIS software solutions customized to a country’s specific needs
Supporting managers to effectively analyze and use the data to inform decision-making
Through training and technical support within a country, ensuring sustainability and continuous improvement of HRIS.

For more information, visit www.capacityproject.org/hris/

Swaziland Uganda Health workforce development Leadership and Governance Policy & Advocacy

Perle Combary

ihadmin2 — Tue, 13 Sep 2016 19:23:41 +0000

Perle Combary Former senior director of program delivery ihadmin2 September 13, 2016

Perle Combary is a sociologist with over 35 years of experience with strategic programming, program management, evaluation and research in the areas of population, reproductive health, family planning, health financing, community-based services, and quality and performance improvement.

Before becoming senior director of program delivery, she served 12 years within a USAID country office in West Africa as program manager and 23 years with evolving leadership responsibilities at IntraHealth’s offices in various countries in Africa and at headquarters, providing technical and management support to numerous health development projects. In this capacity, she fulfilled short term and long term assignments in many countries including Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Swaziland and Togo. More recently, as Benin Country Director, Combary provided overall leadership, technical and management guidance to the USAID-funded ACQUIRE’s project. She led the regional Southern Africa Human Capacity Development (SAHCD) project based in South Africa, and she also served as program director for West Africa and Middle East. Combary has a PhD in Sociology from Paris VIII University in France and a master's in information sciences. She is fluent in English and French.

English, French

IntraHealth Expands Global Health Activities In India And Africa

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Sep 2016 12:26:20 +0000

IntraHealth Expands Global Health Activities In India And Africa Anonymous (not verified) September 13, 2016 September 30, 2006

During September, IntraHealth received three separate multi-million-dollar awards to improve health in India, Tanzania and Southern Africa. The first, a $25 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), funds a program to improve maternal, neonatal and child health care in Northern India. IntraHealth has worked in India for more than ten years, leading and providing technical assistance to projects funded by USAID and the Gates Foundation.

Even as technology outsourcing to India from the U.S. booms, a huge gap remains between the two countries in maternal and child health. One woman dies every five minutes in India from complications related to childbirth and pregnancy; 50% of children in the country are undernourished and 25% of the world’s deaths among children occur in India. The five-year Vistaar Project will work in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand, home to approximately 10 million pregnant women and 14 million children under the age of five. In these states, maternal and child death rates are among the highest in the world.

"With the changes in the Indian economy and the good relations between our countries, the U.S. has an excellent opportunity to support India to substantially improve the well-being of its poorest women and children," says IntraHealth CEO Pape Gaye.

IntraHealth has also been awarded grants to work in Tanzania and Southern Africa. In Tanzania a $2.5 million project from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will expand routine counseling and testing for HIV. The project, funded through the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, will help bring HIV/AIDS services to nearly two million individuals over five years. IntraHealth is also working to strengthen human resources for health in Tanzania through the global Capacity Project.

Current efforts to improve HIV/AIDS programs and services in Lesotho and Swaziland will continue through a $5 million, two-year USAID-funded program that will also work in other countries in the Southern Africa region. Under this grant IntraHealth will mentor a network of regional organizations so that they are better able to strengthen the health workforce and health care systems in their own countries.

India Lesotho Swaziland Tanzania The Vistaar Project