Organizational Capacity Assessment of Private Health Facility Associations in Ethiopia

The project's support initially focused on principal tasks required for newly established associations, and commendable results have been achieved by the associations in this short period of time, especially in bringing key concerns of the private health sector to health policy makers. The aim of this organizational capacity self-assessment was to evaluate the current state of the PHFAs against main pillars of efficient and well-functioning organizations and identify their main organizational development needs. This assessment compares the PHFAs' capacity to the baseline captured in their first self-assessment, which they conducted in 2017. PHSP's capacity building support aims at ensuring that the PHFAs attain the necessary organizational, operational, and technical capacities to fully overtake and capably continue administering the operations of their programs in full scope and scale. The assessment revealed an average overall improvement by 45 percentage points from the first self-assessment in terms of the PHFAs' compliance with the standards determined by the assessment tool under the nine domains. Within the PHFAs, the change ranged from 42% in Dire Dawa to 49% in Oromia. From among the nine organizational capacity domain areas, the level of attainment of PHFAs ranged from 6% in governance to 81% in administrative operations, highlighting the development of growing organizations. The assessment also identified key areas for improvement, such as the need to develop a management information system and internal control mechanism in SNNPR and Amhara. Likewise, PHFAs need to revisit their internal quality assurance practices to embrace workable project monitoring and evaluation tools, so as to synchronize implementation of yearly program activities towards attaining key objectives of their respective strategic plans. In view of this, majority of PHFAs need to enhance ongoing partnership building and networking efforts to initiate joint programs with the Federal Ministry of Health, the Food, Medicine and Health Care Administration and Control Authority, Regional Health Bureaus, potential funding partners, and stakeholders. The assessment also prioritized key activities to increase the management capacity of PHFAs and their respective secretariats. Coupled with improvements in management information systems, standard membership management systems, and project monitoring and evaluation tools and practices, this will help embed quality assurance into the organizational and institutional standing of the PHFAs. PHFAs will then be better placed to leverage technical and financial resources from potential partners (i.e. development partners, FMOH, RHBs, private sector) and hence elevate the impact of their interventions in supporting health programs of the country.