Responding effectively to the increasing complexity of the HIV and TB epidemics requires high-quality, contextually responsive, and strategic technical assistance, which provides tailored guidance to facilities, regions, or governments with the aim of effecting, managing, and evaluating change to improve health services or systems.
EGPAF offers effective technical assistance rooted in long-standing field expertise, 30+ years of relationships built with local cultural and political entities, and flexible, collaborative capacity building among clients, and our technical assistance is informed by programmatic lessons learned, operations research, novel guidance, and effective innovations.
Building Technical Assistance Models
The process of building a model of TA that works begins with listening to the needs of our TA clients and ensuring we are working together in a trusted relationship. We package these TA approaches into models of health service delivery support, customizing packages to the precise needs of TA recipients. For example, our Capacity to Impact model was created to strengthen the skills of local partners to sustainably address the HIV epidemics in their context.
EGPAF constantly ensures improvement and refinement in TA services so that the clients we support can improve their organization and management, increase the human resources available to provide quality services, reduce long waiting times for clients, and be more responsive to people’s cultural, ethnic, or financial preferences. Our TA is rooted in quality improvement—wherein we test changes of improvement and scale up evidence-informed practices to truly strengthen health systems.
Much of our TA is implemented through our own country office platforms—spread across sub-Saharan Africa. To ensure the highest quality of our own services, we have developed and implemented a model of quality improvement called the Program Optimization Approach, which focuses not just on facility-level improvement of a health program but also on the technology, operations, and research.
Tracking Technical Assistance Models
The Data Informed Coaching and Supervision (DISC) is a digital tool developed by EGPAF to guide and track EGPAF technical assistance to sites. EGPAF use the DISC in Kenya and Tanzania with the select purpose to re-enforce accountability, document and monitor support visits to sites; support EGPAF supervision and mentorship team’s follow-up on site TA recommendations; and triangulate information from SIMS and site performance indicators to pinpoint TA needs for sites.