Evaluating Public Health Programs at Scale

Program evaluations are important in global health for many reasons. Some of the most important reasons are to: 1) service as a "reality check" on subjective expectations; 2) to guide continued improvement of the program; and 3) to justify continued funding. In this course, you will learn how to design and carry out high-quality program evaluations that answer the priority questions of program managers. Although much of the content is relevant to all program evaluations, we will focus on the evaluation of programs being delivered at scale by governments and their partners in low and middle income countries. This module will introduce you to program evaluation and our focus on effectiveness evaluations of large-scale reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health and nutrition (RMNCH&N) programs.

This module will walk you through the steps to designing an evaluation including identifying relevant stakeholders, developing an impact model, and selecting appropriate data sources and indicators.

This module will help you choose appropriate evaluation designs after defining priority evaluation questions.

This module will guide you through how to critically appraise a program's targets for coverage and impact using the Lives Saved Tool, assess program implementation strength and quality of care, measure coverage, and estimate program impact.

This module will outline steps to developing measurement and analysis plans, integrating equity in your evaluations, and how to promote the uptake and use of evaluation results.

This module will review all course concepts using a real-world example - the evaluation of integrated community case management of childhood illness (iCCM) in Ethiopia. The course concludes with a reading on helpful skills for evaluators and resources for further learning about evaluation.