One of the gaps in the current Malawi's Health Sector Strategic Plan is an evaluation. As one of the conditions for its financial and technical support to the Malawi's Ministry of Health, the Australia Government has requested that the revised plan for Malawi should include an evaluation plan clearly outlining how it will assess the success of its health sector plan. As part of of your consultancy work, you are now being asked to develop an evaluation plan for the Malawi's Health sector based on the priorities, overall goal, objectives and strategies which you identified in your initial review of the Malawi's Health Sector Plan.
Your task as an external consultant;
Drawing on the initial review of the Malawi's health sector plan from your first assignment, develop an evaluation plan addressing the following evaluation requirements;
- A clear logic frame that presents the relationship of the proposed priority health needs for the next plan, planning context, the inputs, outputs, outcomes (short-term) , and impact (long-term outcomes) as well as performance indicators.
- Drawing on three key priority areas which you identified in your first assignment, what should be the focus of the evaluation in order to generate useful information for assessing the success of the Malawi's next health plan?
- What evaluation type (s) and design (s) will be appropriate for your plan?
- What evaluation questions need to be answered and type of data need to be collected?
- What methods of data collection will be appropriate?
- Who needs to be involved as key stakeholders for the evaluation process and why?
- Who will be the main users of the evaluation results?
- How will the findings be disseminated to the relevant users?
- List resources which will be required for the evaluation.
- Indicate an estimated time-frame for the evaluation.
A suggested outline for the assignment
The basic outline and your assignment MUST address all the sections as outlined here. Feel free to restructure the presentation of your final write-up to allow for creativity and uniqueness in approaching this assignment as long as you address the key sections.
1. Title page: This should include the title of the evaluation plan, author with credentials, to whom the proposal is addressed, and date.
2. Executive summary: provide a brief summary of; the evaluation focus and purpose; the type of evaluation, evaluation design, types of data to be collected, data collection methods; estimated time frame for conducting the evaluation; resources required for the evaluation; and users of the evaluation results.
3. Background information: Talk to the fact that as a consultant you reviewed the Malawi's Health Sector Plan and based on your chosen planning framework, discuss the areas that need to be improved and rationale for improvement i.e. give examples of where there is need for more information to understand the health issues or establish baseline for future reference at the evaluation stage.
4. Evaluation focus: based on the key priority areas which you identified in your initial review of the Malawi's Health Sector Plan, discuss the focus or scope of the evaluation and the evaluation questions that will be appropriate for generating information relevant for evaluating the success of the Malawi's Health Sector Plan
5. Methodology: Based on your logic frame, describe the type of the proposed evaluation and design of your evaluation; identify types of data that will be collected to answer the evaluation questions, sources and data collection methods. A table or tables will be useful here accompanied by text to explain the table or tables.
6. Time-frame and estimated resources: present an estimated time frame and resources required for the evaluation.
7. Stakeholders: who will be involved in conducting the evaluation and who are the intended users. Remember to apply stakeholder analysis principles here.
8. Dissemination of findings: how will the findings be disseminated?
9. Conclusion: is this evaluation worth? Give a final punch arguing why this evaluation needs to happen and what will be the implications if Malawi Government does not evaluate its plan. You will need to think about the relevance of evaluation for the health sector and tailor that to the Malawi scenario.