Support for Analysis and Research in Africa.
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CHILD SURVIVAL Child Survival Activities Child Survival Key Contacts Child Survival Publications

The SARA Project provides technical support for the management of the Child Survival results packages of the USAID Africa Bureau, Office of Sustainable Development (AFR/SD). These include improving health worker performance, improving household and community child health, and strengthening health financing and reform. SARA assists AFR/SD with technical aspects of managing its grants to the World Health Organization Bureau for Africa (WHO/AFRO), UNICEF, and the USAID Global Bureau's BASICS Project. SARA helps to inform and promote AFR/SD concerns in these areas, and carries out research/analysis and dissemination/advocacy activities.

Improving Provider Performance

SARA activities support the following strategies in the area of improving provider performance:

  • Approaches developed to scale up IMCI
  • Approaches developed to integrate quality improvement/problem-solving approaches into national systems for child health
  • Increased African capacity at regional, sub-regional, and national levels to give technical assistance for child health
  • Approaches developed to improve pre-service training for child health at health facility, community, and home-care levels.

Improving approaches to household and community child health

  • Approaches developed for individual and community behavior change for child and maternal health
  • Approaches developed for improving the availability at community level of critical supplies for child and maternal health
  • Increased African capacity to provide technical support for planning, imple-mentation, evaluation, and monitoring of behavior change/community programs, qualitative research, and materials development

Ongoing activities include:

Description of existing qualitative research manuals

The Qualitative Research for Improved Health Programs Manual was designed for program managers and researchers in Africa. It describes and discusses qualitative research methods and manuals which are available in the fields of child and reproductive health, including HIV/AIDS and malaria. About 1000 copies have been disseminated, reaching 29 countries in Africa. 74 percent of these were sent out on request. The French version of the manual is available.

Presenting the economic rational for IMCI investments

The brochure 'Saving Children's Lives' is designed to be used by child health advocates as part of the strategy to reach decision makers who hold the purse strings at different levels, and who are not usually health professionals. It argues for investing in child health; explains that IMCI is concerned with health systems and the community, as well as health facilities, that expenditures needed are large investment costs, and discusses some of the economic and social impact of the approach. This is available in French also.

Development of a cadre of African consultants for household/community IMCI

SARA is working with WHO/HQ, WHO/AFRO, UNICEF, and BASICS international and national consultants who will be assisting countries to develop strategies for household and community child health / community IMCI. The materials are in second draft and will be tested in late 2001.

Capacity building initiative on qualitative research

SARA continues to work with our African partnets (CERPOD) in planning its capacity building initiative on qualitative research, which will focus on reproductive and child health issues. A different technical theme will be chosen each year for when the training and country teams from that specific area will participate, to improve the likelihood of new skills being actually used as part of program interventions.

ALIVE: Advocacy model for the reduction of neo-natal mortality

Even though neo-natal mortality accounts for an average of 45% of Infant Mortality Rates in Africa, child survival programs have historically placed little emphasis on the peri-natal and neo-natal period. SARA, with additional funding from Save the Children, has led the development of ALIVE - an advocacy model that uses local team building and database models to estimate the human and economic consequences of neo-natal mortality and morbidity.

The process of applying ALIVE in a country includes:

  1. forming a team of local experts/advocates in safe motherhood;
  2. training the team in the use of the computer models, while inputting country-specific data;
  3. running and fine-tuning the models to obtain country-wide (or sub-country) estimates of the consequences of unsafe motherhood, possibly including the potential impact of a proposed intervention;
  4. with the team, developing Power Point presentations that can be used to advocate for safe motherhood and the proposed intervention; and
  5. helping the team to organize and carry out one or more advocacy events that use the presentations.

View ALIVE presentation