The Challenge
Higher quality, more equitable primary health care (PHC) is essential to improve outcomes in Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health and Nutrition (RMNCAH-N). There has been considerable progress in understanding how to measure the quality and equity of PHC, but better measurement has not translated to improved RMNCAH-N health outcomes. Why?
Traditional methods of collecting health systems data offer valuable insights, but often come with challenges that limit their frequency and timeliness. For example, routine health management information systems (HMIS) and other administrative data sources are perceived as too low quality to be useful for decision making. And large scale in-person surveys, which remain the gold standard in health systems measurement, require significant planning and resources which often prevent their frequent administration and timeliness to inform implementation and course correction. These challenges prevent Ministries of Health (MoH), health systems managers, and other stakeholders from turning data into actionable steps that can drive better health outcomes.
The Opportunity
In search of a solution, the Global Financing Facility for Women, Children and Adolescents (GFF), in partnership with country leaders, developed the Frequent Assessments and Systems Tools for Resilience (FASTR) initiative — a rapid-cycle analytics and data use program.
FASTR supports countries with timely, rigorous and practical approaches to monitor the performance of their PHC systems with a particular focus on the needs of women, children adolescents and RMNCAH-N services. FASTR has developed four technical approaches – analysis of RMNCAH-N service use, rapid-cycle health facility phone surveys, rapid-cycle household and client surveys, and deeper follow-up analyses. These approaches are tailored to address specific data gaps and data use needs at the country level.
To date, over ten countries have adopted FASTR’s approaches to identify the impact of shocks on health service usage, monitor the implementation of national health systems reforms, and strengthen data use at all levels of the health system. To learn more about FASTR, visit the GFF’s Data Portal.
Results for Development is partnering with the GFF to expand and scale FASTR across GFF partner countries, ensuring that FASTR’s tools, approaches, and lessons learned become country-oriented global public goods.
R4D’s Work
As the lead implementation partner for FASTR in Ghana and Nigeria, R4D is partnering with the GFF, the World Bank, the Nigeria Federal Ministry of Health, the Ghana Health Service, and other key stakeholders to adapt FASTR approaches to meet the specific data use needs in both countries. This includes designing data-use process flows to strengthen the analyze-to-action cycle, institutionalizing new rapid-cycle analytic approaches, and strengthening data use processes and competencies at both national and subnational levels.
R4D brings deep expertise in coaching and mentoring, collaborative learning and evaluation and adaptive learning to support countries to not only generate more timely data, but to translate that data into decision making for improved PHC performance. Throughout this process, R4D will document and learn from the approaches being implemented, ensuring that the lessons learned are continuously improving the GFF’s FASTR initiative.
