Mid-term evaluation of Neglected Tropical Disease control programme

The Issue

At the time of this project, over 100 million people (two of every three Nigerians) suffered or were at risk from one or more neglected tropical diseases (NTD). The four-year, £11.6m United Kingdom (UK) Department for International Development-funded programme aimed to reduce the prevalence and interrupt the transmission of seven such diseases by strengthening the health system. The programme, called UNITED, was led by Sightsavers with NGO, academic, and private sector partners.

Tropical Health was commissioned at the mid-point of the programme to evaluate performance, identify gaps in implementation, make recommendations for improvement, and assess benefits to the overall health system with a view to helping the programme achieve its objectives by the end of the programme in 2017.

Our Approach

Tropical Health conducted a document review, site visits and key informant and focus group interviews to evaluate the programme, comparing performance against experience from other major health and integrated NTD control programmes as well as UNITED programme milestones. Programme databases, budgets, and project reports provided quantitative data for analysis.

In just three months, Tropical Health delivered a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of performance and a set of recommendations for DFID, Sightsavers, partners, government, and other stakeholders to help ensure the programme would meet its objectives by 2017.

Our Findings

Tropical Health evaluated the programme’s progress in terms of the criteria of relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, scalability/replicability, sustainability and coherence/coordination, as applied to five different activities of the programme, and conducted a SWOT analysis. The evaluation report and its recommendations were used to improve the performance of the programme in the second half, which was important not only for efficiency but part of milestones needed in order to achieve ambitious disease elimination targets.