TB REACH Wave 1 Monitoring & Evaluation

Background
On January 25th 2010, the TB REACH initiative was launched as part of the WHO Stop TB Partnership. The main goal of TB REACH is to promote early and increased case detection of infectious tuberculosis and ensure timely treatment, while maintaining high TB cure rates.

 
TB REACH strives to facilitate government and civil society to go out to areas/populations with limited access to health services to detect TB cases that otherwise would have stayed unnoticed, using innovative approaches. Furthermore, the initiative aims to increase the body of evidence on the impact of TB case finding activities by including an evaluation component to measure the additional number of TB cases found by each project.
Through a wave based funding, TB REACH awards grants for a one year period to selected institutions or organizations that have put forward successful proposals in order to detect additional TB cases. In Wave 1, 30 projects in 19 countries were awarded a grant. HLSP, in consortium with KIT, was contracted to carry out the external monitoring and evaluation of these grants.

Objectives
The main objective of the collaboration between HLSP and KIT is to monitor and evaluate the impact of the TB REACH Wave 1 grant awarded projects on TB case finding, notification and treatment success.

More specific to i) assess the impact on the efforts to control tuberculosis over and above what would be accomplished without the grants, ii) advise on any mid-course correction that may be needed for grants whose work is not expected to lead to anticipated results and iii) address how to improve the effectiveness, efficiency and impact of the work undertaken by grants over the next five years.

Activities
• assessing the validity of the baseline data provided by the TB REACH projects concerning (historical) case notification, treatment success, demographic data and other relevant indicators for the evaluation and control populations

• designing the best M&E strategy for each project by establishing valid controls, detailed screening and diagnostic protocols, documenting the additionality calculation and individualizing the standard quarterly reporting template

• organizing (content-wise) a grantee workshop to discuss the M&E framework through presentations and group-work

• monitoring information from quarterly project reports and identifying administrative and performance challenges

• reviewing project activities and results, project’s data collection and data quality assessment tools, external factors analysis and mitigation, strategy and work plan and the view of stakeholders during a project visit

• producing quarterly and annual summary reports with an overview of the results of all projects