MEASURE Evaluation – Strategic Information for South Africa (SIFSA)

Through the MEASURE Evaluation-Strategic Information for South Africa (MEval-SIFSA) project, JSI and partners built the capacity of the South African government, PEPFAR, and their implementing partners to produce information that contributes to sustainable policy, planning, and programmatic decisions.

PEPFAR was scaling down its funding and activities in South Africa. To prepare, PEPFAR funded a technical assistance model to strengthen the capacity of South African provinces and districts to improve the quality of information they have pertaining to their HIV programming. The goal was for South African government entities to be able to collect, analyze, and use this information to make informed decisions about future HIV programming.

MEASURE Evaluation-Strategic Information for South Africa (MEval-SIFSA) was a five-year project that built the capacity of the South African government, PEPFAR, and their implementing partners to ensure that the health system in South Africa produces useful and high-quality information that contributes to sustainable policy, planning and programmatic decision making.

The purpose of the project was to advance health information management, monitoring, and evaluation by creating, implementing, and facilitating state-of-the-art approaches to improving monitoring and evaluation, health information systems (HIS), and data use. We collected and shared information, knowledge, and best practices to support evidence-based decision making at national, provincial and district level.

MEval-SIFSA placed a strategic emphasis on:

• A system-wide approach that reduced duplication of effort and reaches all levels of data producers and users
• Leveraging technology to improve consistency, extend reach, and lower unit costs while avoiding pitfalls such as a failure to integrate systems
• Data use that addresses challenges and constraints, training monitoring and evaluation (M&E) personnel to improve data management and user-friendly data presentation, training on data analysis and interpretation, and regular data quality checks, and
• A commitment to sustainability that will transition leadership and implementation of health sector M&E strengthening to government units and local organizations, with demonstrated capacity increases over the life of the project.

Under MEval-SIFSA, JSI was the lead implementer under MEASURE Evaluation and led the capacity building, HIS, and M&E components of MEval-SIFSA. MEASURE Evaluation, a global monitoring and evaluation project led by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC).

The project leveraged JSI’s previous monitoring and evaluation work at all levels of the health system as well as JSI’s existing relationships with the Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation (DPME), the South African government’s Public Administration Leadership and Management Academy (PALAMA), University of Pretoria, PEPFAR implementers, and other development partners.