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COMMUNITY CASE STUDY article

Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Education and Promotion
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1188584
This article is part of the Research Topic Achieving Impacts at Scale in Early Childhood Interventions: Innovations in Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning View all 20 articles

Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning: The Key to Building Effective Partnerships With Government To Improve Health in the Rakai and Kyotera Districts of Uganda

Provisionally accepted
Marc Sklar Marc Sklar *Daniel Murokora Daniel Murokora *
  • Babies and Mothers Alive Foundation, Brooklyn, Georgia, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This paper describes the development of the Babies and Mothers Alive (BAMA) Foundation, a Ugandan-led non-government organization with a goal to improve access to quality reproductive, maternal and newborn care services in the government health sector. Since 2015, BAMA has established fully engaged partnerships with four district governments and the Ministry of Health, initially partnering with 24 health centers and hospitals, we have now expanded our work to 60 health facilities serving a population of approximately one million people.In this article we describe the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) system that has guided success in program design and implementation and informed the expansion of our health system strengthening interventions over the past eight years, as we expanded both the scope and scale of our partnership model. Our program design and implementation strategies have been defined by community-based, integrated, MEL activities that engage district health leadership, health providers and facility staff, political, cultural, and faith-based leaders, as well as our beneficiaries. Quantitative and qualitative data collected over the past eight years, as well as baseline health surveys in our two new districts of implementation, are guiding the first stages of our transition to scale strategy. Our MEL process is dynamic, as we continue to identify critical needs, and through data sharing with all stakeholders design the most cost-effective and sustainable program interventions.We believe our model of an integrated process of evidenced-based learning that includes our partners, both in government and civil society, and our beneficiary communities is relevant to other locally-led, community-based organizations working to transform the quality of government health delivery systems.

    Keywords: Maternal and newborn health, Reproductive Health, Monitoring, Evaluation, &Learning, Government-NGO Partnerships, Health system strengthening Maternal and newborn health, & Learning

    Received: 17 Mar 2023; Accepted: 04 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Sklar and Murokora. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Marc Sklar, Babies and Mothers Alive Foundation, Brooklyn, 11215, Georgia, United States
    Daniel Murokora, Babies and Mothers Alive Foundation, Brooklyn, 11215, Georgia, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.