How can non-profits leverage donor-required M&E indicators for internal management?
An MIT team shares a dashboard-style tool developed from their work with a community health program in rural Uganda
Following the completion of their Global Health Delivery Lab (ghdLAB) projects in Africa and India, we asked our MIT student teams to reflect on their ghdLAB project experience and share what they learned – insights, a how-to guide, best practice tips – in ways that can be used by others undertaking similar work or facing similar issues in global health. We share their thoughts under the ‘management for the world’ (mftw) collection in the hopes that others will build on it in keeping with the creative commons license.
By Yuko Amizaki, Terry Hu, Shirley Li, Jeongyeon Shim
Many healthcare delivery organizations in resource-constrained setting focus on Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) for donors, collecting and reporting what the donors specify. However, many organizations do not pay much attention on what they need to measure and how they should interpret the data collected for internal management purposes; nor do they scrutinize the data collected over time to track progress.
In one fieldwork example, we have developed a dashboard-style management tool that collect key performance indicators longitudinally to facilitate the use of M&E output in day-to-day management. This module provides a high-level overview of M&E, how they are used by nonprofit healthcare delivery organizations and the challenges they face (especially in the context of the fieldwork organization), how indicators were selected for monthly longitudinal dashboard, and an example of the managerial questions to be asked to use the data for operational improvement.
A summary of open-source EMR systems available is included at the end of the presentation for organizations that aspire to upgrade their patient data collection system as well.
Download M&E for internal management (pdf).
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