Program data needs assessment for Sidaction

Description

One of the specific focuses of Sidaction’s TREMPLINS program is to improve the supply, quality and accessibility of healthcare services provided by partner CSOs. As the quality of care is linked to the quality of beneficiary follow-up, Sidaction wishes to support its partners in improving their capacities and related data monitoring tools.

In this context, CartONG is working with Sidaction to help improve and develop its partners’ data management. For the first phase of the project, CartONG’s support consisted of a needs assessment whose main objective was to assess the data management methods of Sidaction’s partners in West and Central Africa, and to understand the needs and skills of the staff in charge of managing this data at the level of each organization.

Data collection was carried out in two stages. The first stage consisted of a secondary data review, which gathered qualitative and quantitative data – via a questionnaire and discussions with key people – on the information and tools already available.

The second stage consisted of semi-structured interviews and focus group interviews, with a discussion grid adapted to each profile. These interviews enabled us not only to understand the difficulties, needs and skills of those involved in associative data management, but also to “map” existing or hoped-for data flows and thus identify the “nodes” of sharing between players and the needs for interoperability of data management tools at the level of each activity.

The end result of this first phase of support was a comprehensive needs assessment report including the outcomes of the secondary data review (inventory of tools used, their usage, constraints etc.), and of the interviews (needs expressed, priority needs identified, feelings, skills etc.). The report also included a visualization of data flows and recommendations to be implemented in the short and medium term with a view to efficient Information Management within each organization. Recommendations were also made for Sidaction to strengthen the capacities of its partners and their support.