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Youth involvement
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Implementing Standards-based Quality Improvement Processes at the Community Level for Orphans and Vulnerable Children: The Strengthening Community Safety Nets (SCSN) Project, Ethiopia
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Publications
The Strengthening Community Safety Nets (SCSN) project, managed by ChildFund International with its partners University Research Co., LLC (URC) and Christian Children’s Fund of Canada (CCFC), was a three-year (September 2008 – August 2011) project in Ethiopia. Its goal was to promote healthy child development for 50,000 orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) and to assist 8,500 primary and secondary caregivers through comprehensive, family-centered, and child-focused care and support services. The project served nine Ethiopian catchment areas with high HIV prevalence rates, poverty levels, and numbers of vulnerable children and with limited coverage of social and health services. The catchment areas served were five urban areas of Addis Ababa (Gulele, Kolfe Keranyo, Nefasilk Lafto, Arada, and Akaki Kality sub-cities) and four woredas (districts) of the Oromia region (Fentale, Dugda, Debre Zeit, and Shashemene).
In order to improve care given to vulnerable children through SCSN initiatives, the science of quality improvement (QI) was used to ensure that the newly adopted standards were met at points of service delivery. QI uses quantitative and qualitative methods to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and safety of service delivery processes and systems as well as the performance of human resources in delivering products and services. In order to determine how the standards could be practically and efficiently implemented in the context of the SCSN project, members of the community involved in coordinating the delivery of services to vulnerable children at four model sites, along with vulnerable children themselves and other beneficiaries, were engaged in a QI process.This case study details QI efforts at the four sites, explains how communities were engaged, discusses how changes were tracked and what changes were seen, and presents specific lessons learned from the process. -
Report on the Children's Workshop in Nigeria
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Publications
From March 18-19, 2011, in coordination with the Federal Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development, the USAID Health Care Improvement Project (HCI), held a Children’s Workshop in Abuja, Nigeria. Also participating as facilitators were personnel from Save the Children and Hope Worldwide Nigeria. The purpose of the two-day workshop was to bring together youth who are recipients of programs providing services to Orphans and Vulnerable children (OVC) to provide them with an opportunity to share their thoughts on the services they are receiving, inform providers on what children’s real needs and concerns are, and to tell us what we can all do better to help them achieve their full potential. The document below is a report on the proceedings of the workshop including activities implemented and concerns expressed by the children.
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PEPFAR Care that Counts: Quality Improvement for OVC Programs
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PEPFAR | Care that Counts: Improving the Quality of Programs for Orphans and Vulnerable Children
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Lessons Lessons learned from OVC programs have revealed the need to improve service quality and to strengthen harmonization across partners around the questions: How can our programs make a measurable difference in children’s well-being? What are the essential actions that we all agree need to be part of a service to best to mitigate the impact of HIV/AIDS on children and families, in the pursuit of efficiency, effectiveness, equity, reach, and scale and sustainability? In response to the observed need to improve the quality of services provided to orphans and vulnerable children, in 2007, PEPFAR, through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), sought to create a regional initiative to support countries and implementing partners in improving the quality of OVC programming. With support from the USAID Health Care Improvement Project (HCI), a regional OVC quality improvement initiative was organized. The initiative, which has come to be known as Care that Counts, has engaged national stakeholders, program implementers, and donor agencies throughout sub-Saharan Africa in improving the quality of OVC programming.
This short report describes the efforts of the Care that Counts Initiative to support to implementers at the country level to:
1) Build constituencies and commitment for quality in OVC programming,
2) Develop OVC service standards through consensus processes involving key stakeholders, including children and their families,
3) Undertake quality improvement activities at the point of service delivery with community-based volunteers and organizations, and
4) Gather evidence that standards and other quality improvement approaches have a measurable impact. -
Interagency Youth Working Group (IYWG)
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Publications
The IYWG provides global technical leadership to advance the reproductive health and HIV/AIDS outcomes of young people ages 10-24 in international public health settings. Click on the link to view more information about the IYWG, partner organizations, meetings, and publications.
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Quality Improvement for OVC Services: Changing Youth Participation from a "Token Voice" to a Key Actor
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This short report describes three guiding principles for involving children and adolescents in improving the quality of services they receive. These principles hold that service providers should: 1) focus on the needs and desires of those being served; 2) recognize that children are part of a larger entity—a family and/or community; and 3) do no harm. The report also briefly describes experiences from Ethiopia and Tanzania with engaging children and guardians in QI teams.
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OVC Support Web Site
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OVCsupport.net is a global hub for the exchange of experience, practice and tools on policy and programming around children and HIV funded by USAID. The web site was originally developed by the International HIV/AIDS Alliance and Family Health International to serve as an an electronic library of resources about support to orphans and vulnerable children that have been collated by the Alliance and FHI from a wide range of organizations, based on the understanding that there are many good approaches to supporting orphans and vulnerable children. Known as the "OVC Toolkit", the site addressed a wide range of themes related to support for orphans and vulnerable children– for example: situation assessments, access to education, psychosocial support, children’s participation, and monitoring and evaluation. In addition to over 500 downloadable resources, the site highlights key issues to consider for orphans and vulnerable children support programming. Most of the resources contained on the site are in English.
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Quality in Focus Conference Calls
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The Quality Improvement Initiative for OVC Programs, funded by the United States Agency for International Development through the USAID Health Care Improvement (HCI) Project, brings together U.S. Government, other national government, and civil society partners with both OVC program and quality improvement expertise. Together these partners discuss, share and reflect on quality improvement processes for OVC services, especially at the point of service delivery and during contact with the children.
Key to the QI Initiative is sharing of experiences. Monthly Quality in Focus Calls provide an opportunity for OVC program implementers to share and learn more about QI processes for OVC services. To join in on the Quality in Focus monthly conference calls, contact Louis Camara at lcamara@urc-chs.com to receive email announcements of upcoming calls.
Minutes of previous Quality in Focus Calls are linked below.
