South Africa continues to experience challenges in meeting national and global targets in relation to health outcomes. Recently the National Department of Health launched the primary health care (PHC) re-engineering strategy, aimed at strengthening primary health care in order to accelerate attainment of government’s vision for ’A long and healthy life for all South Africans’. PHC re-engineering is anchored on the four priority areas of the National Service Delivery Agreement (NSDA), namely, increasing life expectancy, reducing maternal and child mortality rates, combating HIV and AIDS and decreasing the burden of disease from TB, and strengthening the effectiveness of the health system.
In line with the PHC re-engineering objective of strengthening the effectiveness of the health system, the Soul City Institute for Health and development communication (SCI) will be piloting a community based monitoring project in PHC. The aim of the project is to promote increased demand and accountability of the health services, particularly maternal & child health services, through strengthening community participation and increased collaboration between the community, health services and civil society organisations. The pilot is based on a similar model implemented in India through a comprehensive framework for community based monitoring and planning. The pilot will take place in 9 districts in South Africa and the evaluation will focus on 5 of the 9 districts, namely Fezile Dabi, Ugu, Amatole, Bojanala and Francis Baard.
Soul City Institute seeks to appoint a service provider to conduct an evaluation of the project on the 5 pilot districts to inform scaling up the intervention and optimising its implementation in 4 additional districts. The process evaluation will seek to answer the following questions:
The evaluation should also document baseline information to, utilisation and quality of services in each of the 5 communities. This should focus on:
It is the responsibility of the researcher to design detailed methodology to address the study’s objectives set out in this TOR. However, the study should be guided by the key principles of transparency, accountability and independence.
The successful bidder will be expected to provide a COSTED evaluation plan that clearly sets out how the study will be carried out in line with the approach and principles outlined. Such an evaluation plan should include (but not limited to) the following:
The successful bidder will be expected to undertake the following activities:
It must be noted that all outputs from this exercise remain the sole property of Soul City. The researcher can and may not use the report for anything other than specified in these TORs for anything unless with written permission from Soul City. All written documents will be made available electronically in Word/ Excel as well as PDF format.
Table 1: Deliverables, Outputs and Reporting requirements
Activity and outputs | Timeline |
Draft Evaluation plan | July 2013 |
Final Evaluation plan | End of July 2013 |
Baseline Report | September 2013 |
Draft findings report | February 2014 |
Final evaluation report including all data and annexures | March 2014 |
All supporting documents and secondary data (literature reviews, formative research reports and HST facility data report) will be made available to the researcher. The M&E manager will be available for consultation.
Budget: R500 000.
Work will commence immediately and timelines will be negotiated at contracting.
All interested bidders should submit detailed proposals to viwe@soulcity.org.za no later than 24th June 2013.
Posted in Job opportunities