The Monitoring and Evaluation to Assess and Use Results (MEASURE) Evaluation Phase IV Project builds on the decades-long commitment by the Bureau for Global Health to support health sector monitoring and evaluation and country health information system strengthening. The project is designed, in part, to further efforts of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to end preventable child and maternal deaths (EPCMD) by assisting partner governments and institutions to generate and make use of high-quality health systems data that can be used to guide decision-making on effective interventions.

The strategic objective of the MEASURE Evaluation Phase IV Project is to enable countries to strengthen national, community, and facility-based systems to generate high quality health information that is used to inform decisions on policies, programs, and resource allocations at all levels of the health system.

To achieve this goal, MEASURE Evaluation Phase IV focuses on four intermediate results, or expected outcomes:

• Strengthened collection, analysis, and use of routine health data
• Improved country capacity to manage health information systems, resources, and staff
• Methods, tools, and approaches improved and applied to address health information challenges and gaps
• Increased capacity for rigorous evaluation

This phase of the project places particular emphasis on health information system sustainability and leverages previous work that emphasized country ownership local capacity-building for implementation of rigorous evaluation. MEASURE Evaluation Phase IV builds on more than 2 decades of results in strengthening data collection systems, innovation in research and research tools, mentorship programs, results sharing and synthesis, fostering leadership, and program and policy evaluation.

In Year One of Phase IV (2014–2015), the project:

• Engaged 12 partners in 9 countries to improve health information systems (HIS) and capacity in data collection, data quality and data use
• Helped develop and deploy U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief’s (PEPFAR’s) Data for Accountability, Transparency, Impact, and Monitoring (DATIM) system and helped seven countries with their rollout of DHIS 2
• Assisted eight countries and two regions to design and implement rigorous health sector evaluations and continued to support the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) impact evaluations in seven countries
• Developed freely available tools, approaches, and technical publications for HIS strengthening and robust evaluation
• Developed tools and research to evaluate and strengthen the functionality, management, and capacity of health information systems, supporting evidence-based program planning and use of data to guide allocation of resources for achieving EPCMD and AIDS-free generation goals
• Assessed Ebola-related implications for reproductive, maternal, neonatal, and child health service delivery and utilization in Guinea and followed with ministry of health capacity building in several countries to improve HIS and disease surveillance in the region
• Formalized a process to learn and share what works to improve country HIS, including characteristics of progression toward optimum HIS performance

The MEASURE Evaluation Phase IV Project is a worldwide, 5-year, $180 million cooperative agreement extending from July 2014 to June 2019. The project is led by the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in collaboration with ICF International, John Snow, Inc., Management Sciences for Health, Palladium, and Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.

Visit the MEASURE Evaluation website to learn more.