Friends of Chitambo: Monitoring & Evaluation visit to Chitambo

Congratulations to Zambian members of our Scottish Government Small Grant Team, Mr. Consider Mudenda, In-country Project Lead; Mr. Chola Mwelwa, Friends of Chitambo (Foch) Trustee and project Steering Group member; Mr. Vincent Kole, Chitambo Knowledge Consultant; and Mr. Levison Chifwaila, Clinical Consultant, for conducting a very successful monitoring and evaluation (M&E) visit at Chitambo last week (22nd to 26th August 2016).

The visit included meetings with key Chitambo Hospital and Rural Health Clinic staff; hearing about progress towards implementation of the free Zambian national shortcode number for health (992); conducting upwards of 20 interviews on health workers' use of the knowledge resources provided by the project; assessing usage of some of the Information and Computer (ICT) devices also provided; and meeting members of some Neighbourhood Health Committees regarding feedback on uptake and usage of the shortcode once it is in place.

Mr. Mwelwa, a nurse based in Chesterfield, England, is from Chitambo, his home village. Opportunely, he was paying a visit home at the time of the M&E visit, with his wife and 12-year-old son Mumba. Ba Chola kindly carried a conference poster for Consider and Vincent to deliver, along with a full paper, at the AHILA conference in Kampala, Uganda (October 2016), along with a USB stick containing a medical e-library, for the Chitambo Hospital emergency care resource centre provided by this project. The e-library was donated by Scottish NGO MCAI: http://www.mcai.org.uk/

Chola is also carrying the completed evaluation forms back to the UK for analysis, in due course.

We will be writing reports but Consider has provided some great photos including some in which young Mumba kindly obliges by modelling both a Friends of Chitambo sponsored Life Wrap (http://www.safemotherhood.ucsf.edu/) and riding an ambulance bicycle. The photos otherwise speak for themselves: M&E Visit to Chitambo August 2016&usp=sharing