Cooperative agreement no. PDC-0526-A-00-6186-00 to Johns Hopkins University, Institute for International Programs

To support PVO field operations, JHU will arrange necessary TA for CS projects, and will provide a limited amount of direct TA when warranted. JHU will also facilitate information networking among PVO"s and will keep PVO staff informed about A.I.D./W resources available to them. The project will provide training through regional and country-level workshops to improve the capacity of PVO"s to solve health problems in developing country settings and work with governments and host country agencies. Three regional conferences (1 French, 2 English) are planned in Africa for FY86/87. On the country level, workshops are proposed for Indonesia, to identify training and evaluation needs of CS projects, and Bolivia, to discuss issues faced by the PVO community (e.g., vaccine procurement, logistics of ORT and immunization delivery, and health information systems). JHU will conduct technical information analyses, covering: (1) CS project implementation plans, annual reports, and other documents; (2) key aspects of the CS projects; and (3) special topics of central relevance to PVO operations. Efforts will also be made to introduce PVO"s to new, low-cost, field-based methods of assessing health care standards, e.g., Lot Quality Asssessment methods. Finally, to help PVO"s to meet A.I.D."s monitoring and evaluation requirements, JHU will: (1) identify needs through consultations with PVO"s; (2) hold training workshops to deal with particular aspects of monitoring and evaluation, and provide TA when needed; (3) develop standardized procedures (e.g., for survey sampling, questionnaire design, and data collection and analysis), experimenting with different approaches; and (4) develop standard microcomputer software for data entry, analysis, and reporting. The monitoring and evaluation data will also be used in comparative studies of CS programs.