In line with our mandate to reinforce the District and health facility capabilities in monitoring and evaluation, METS designed a short-term M&E fellowship program for district bio statisticians and HMIS focal persons. The two modular fellowship program was aimed at building the capacity of the target persons in data management practices including collection, collation, analysis, presentation, dissemination and use of strategic information to inform decisions and planning at district and health facility levels. In addition, the fellows were supported to design M&E projects for addressing critical M&E gaps in their districts. The M&E projects adopted the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) approach to quality improvement and mainly focused on improving HIV/AIDS data quality and use. A total of 30 fellows from 15 districts were enrolled into the fellowship program as the 1st cohort.
The meeting will provide an opportunity for the fellows to disseminate their project results to a wider HIV/AIDS stakeholder forum. This will involve sharing the project outcomes, best practices, lessons learnt and challenges in improving data quality for HIV/AIDS programs at district and health facility level. It is hoped that similar projects may be adopted and scaled nationally.