USAID Evaluation Team Visits Egypt's Gharbia Governorate
Nov 20 2009
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has recently engaged in a 30-year retrospective of Egypt's achievements in population, health and nutrition, including an assessment USAID's role in those accomplishments. As part of this process, an evaluation team met with representatives of the agency's Health Systems 20/20 project based in Cairo. Project staff accompanied the evaluators on a visit to Gharbia Governorate in late October 2009 to showcase the project’s recent achievements in the area of workforce planning.
A group of local Ministry of Health (MOH) staff who have been been coordinating the implementation of workforce planning activities hosted the USAID visitors in Gharbia. Gharbia’s Undersecretary of Health, Dr. Sherif Hammouda, briefed the evaluation team on progress achieved in workforce planning since the start of the project in 2008. He highlighted Health Systems 20/20’s role in building the capacity of the Gharbia governorate team at all levels – facility, district, and directorate. He also emphasized the importance of decentralization as a policy that can promote proper planning and reallocation of workers based on the actual needs of health directors in the governorate.
The evaluation team took a guided tour of Gharbia’s Information Center (a MOH entity responsible for managing and updating governorate health information). Health Systems 20/20 has trained a group of talented staff from the Center to manage workforce data collection and entry in Gharbia. They demonstrated their skills in using the new computerized Workforce Planning Tool, recently developed by the project.
The USAID evaluation team then visited Menshawi General Hospital, where the Health Systems 20/20 has been piloting its workforce planning approach. Hospital representatives gave the team a tour of hospital departments and the hospital’s information center where they demonstrated how workforce data are utilized. The hospital team showcased how they are also using the Health Information System (HIS) that USAID previously developed to analyze health-related data.
At the end of the day, the evaluation team expressed positive feedback about the visit and acknowledged the project’s remarkable achievements, specifically in the building capacity of the Gharbia governorate team to do effective workforce planning.
