The PEPFAR Monitoring and Evaluation and Human Resources for Health Technical Working Groups asked CapacityPlus to develop tools and guidance to support country team efforts in tracking and counting the new health workers being trained with PEPFAR support.
As part of its reauthorization, PEPFAR now includes an indicator that mandates its contribution to addressing the health workforce crisis. The legislation states that PEPFAR will “…help partner countries to train and support retention of health care professionals and paraprofessionals, with the target of training and retaining at least 140,000 new health [workers].”
Conducting interviews
Dykki Settle and I began this work by conducting telephone interviews with 13 PEPFAR country teams to determine what activities were underway to increase health worker production, and what activities were being counted toward the 140,000. We then visited Tanzania to further explore these trends. After analyzing all of these data, one main ground truth emerged—it takes a systems approach to produce health workers. Read more »
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 
