A critical management technique for determining the effectiveness and comprehending how the public health program functions is monitoring and evaluation. Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) can identify whether incorrect implementation was to blame if the intervention fails to generate the expected outcomes. If the intervention is effective, M&E provides critical data on implementation to guide scaling up in other settings. The purpose of M&E interventions is to give implementers, program designers, and other crucial stakeholders information on program progress to achieve desired objectives and demonstrate how the initiative is benefiting the target population [4,3]. The program’s limitations, strengths, and other lessons are all noted by M&E.
According to the National Strategic Health Development Plan’s (NSHDP) end-of-term evaluation, Nigeria’s public health M&E is poor and it has made it difficult to get reliable data to use in decision-making. Data is also difficult to come by because some healthcare facilities do not frequently use the relevant forms and registers and service statistics are not accurately transmitted from the healthcare facilities to the national level via the proper data flow, implying that mechanisms for consistent data quality control are often lacking. Nigeria has developed several M&E plans, however not all of them have been adequately carried out or supervised. For instance, vertical M&E interventions are still used in several program areas in the health sector, which complicate coordination and data exchange and add to the workload of service providers. The weak human capacity to implement an effective and efficient M&E system in the country is another barrier to having high-quality data available for decisions concerning patient care or the administration of healthcare facilities
Effective M&E implementation requires a comprehensive M&E Plan that outlines the data that must be collected, the best technique for obtaining the data, and the best way to use the data results [1]. Monitoring and assessment played a significant role in Nigeria’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. The surveillance and monitoring efforts were overseen by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), which gathered data on cases, testing, contact tracing, and vaccination coverage to estimate the number of affected people.
REFERENCES
1. Marsh, David. 1999. Results Frameworks & Performance Monitoring. A Refresher by David Marsh (ppt) http://www.childsurvival.com/tools/Marsh/sld001.html
2. M&E Plan for the National Strategic Health Development Plan II (2018-2022)
3. MEASURE Evaluation. A Trainer’s Guide to the Fundamentals of Monitoring and Evaluation for Population, Health, and Nutrition Programmes. MEASURE Evaluation Manual Series No. 5. Chapel Hill, NC: MEASURE Evaluation project, Carolina Population Center; 2002. (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/measure/publications/html/ms0205.html, accessed 28 July 2011).
4. USAID. “Performance Monitoring and Evaluation – TIPS # 3: Preparing an Evaluation Scope of Work”, 1996 and “TIPS # 11: The Role of Evaluation in USAID”, 1997, Centre for Development Information and Evaluation. Available at http://www.dec.org/usaid_eval/#004