Growing up in Nigeria, Kayode Odusote liked figuring out how things work. As a young boy, he would often purchase Radio Shack do-it-yourself kits and assemble them.
Years later he became a neurologist and professor, and more recently served as director for human resources development at the West African Health Organization (WAHO). WAHO is an umbrella organization of 15 member countries, and one of Professor Odusote’s key aims was to help these countries gather and use health worker data to inform their decisions. But this wasn’t easy. “We found that none of them had the kind of human resources information system that they could use for planning,” he recalls.
Working with limited resources, he wanted to avoid installing systems that relied on proprietary software, which entails various fees for licensing, upgrades, and customization. “With proprietary products,” he explains, “the vendor controls the costs.” He has stories of proprietary applications developed by vendors in Burkina Faso and Togo; the computers they were built for became outdated and the applications could not be updated to match current operating systems of new, donated computers. They became useless.
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We know that most “year in review” articles are published in January, coinciding with the new calendar year, but the year that’s been consuming our thoughts just ended. 
Kabelo Bitsang, 
CapacityPlus
This post was originally published on the 
Opportunities to spend time with monitoring and evaluation (M&E) colleagues from other organizations are infrequent, yet they provide a valuable way to share knowledge and ideas. Recently, I attended a meeting of the USAID Bureau of Global Health Cooperating Agencies’ M&E Working Group. The meeting convened two USAID deputy assistant administrators, senior leadership from several Bureau of Global Health offices, and dozens of M&E staff from USAID-funded projects.
Working on the 
Working in the field of global health we often hear about the global health workforce shortage: we don’t have enough doctors, nurses, midwives, dentists, community health workers in developing countries. This is true, but what we hear less about is how we manage and support the people we do have, which is also crucial and one of the main charges of the 
The human resources information system (HRIS) implementation team for 
On my trip to India last month, I didn’t plan to focus on maternal health care, but walking through the maternity ward in Bihar, I couldn’t help but worry about the long lines and hours that keep a woman waiting to see a doctor. The health officials I met with are incredibly committed to serving their communities. In one case, I actually had to walk through the maternity ward to reach my meeting with members of the chief surgeon’s office and the head of district medicine. I realized these men and women walk by the patients every day—women like the proud new mother who urged me to come over and take a photograph of her new daughter. Although the hospital I was in is among the nicest in the state, it lacks many of the essential information systems that can make a health system run efficiently and effectively. In practical terms, this might mean the women I walked by would not have to spend so long waiting to be seen. 
