more about my internship...

My first month+ I spent most of my time cleaning and analyzing data from a baseline survey that was done in April. It was a smaller survey (2 page questionnaire carried out in just over 700 households) that set out to describe the target population and provide information on a few specific indicators: key behaviors, levels of knowledge, and coverage and utilization of water and sanitation services. Surveys like this are often part of international health projects. They are done at the beginning and end (and sometimes mid-way) and help NGOs and their donors know whether their projects were effective. An important thing I learned from doing this is that a good baseline survey does not have to be very complicated or long. Every question in this survey related directly to one of our indicators or answered a specific question we had about the target population. Although it is often tempting to ask more questions and collect more information (because it is interesting to learn more!), time and money and interviewee fatigue are good reasons to keep it simple.

So after analysis comes report writing, report reviewing, more report reviewing, and then finally a finished English draft. There is no money in our budget for translation, so I've offered to do a rough draft in French in my down time and hopefully our health manager will help me edit!

Since finishing the report I've been working on creating a monitoring and evaluation tool to hold all the information we'll be collecting for the health systems strengthening project. Basically its a massive spreadsheet where we input all data we collect from 50 health centers in 3 districts. I often dream in Excel! Luckily, a good monitoring tool for the CCM project exists already since its been implemented in other countries.

In addition to that, I am also helping the team get ready to train hundreds of community health workers: working on medication projections, revising communications materials (am I really qualified to know what will make sense to rural Ivorians?), and filling out purchase requests to buy all the materials we'll need (there must be a more efficient way than carbon copy).

Needless to say, there is a lot to do here and I'm learning a ton!