Ethiopia

As part of its work with the Nursing Education Partnership Initiative (NEPI) to strengthen nursing education systems and increase the number, quality, and relevance of nursing and midwifery graduates, CapacityPlus supported three Ethiopian colleges of health science to adapt and apply the Bottlenecks and Best Buys approach to conduct capacity assessments of their nursing and midwifery programs. The assessments guided the country’s NEPI Core Group in the development of intervention frameworks, plans, and budgets for scaling up the quantity and quality of graduates. In addition, the project conducted a costing study of undergraduate nursing and midwifery programs and their associated clinical facilities at two colleges of health sciences. The study identifies resource constraints for scaling up the quantity and/or improving the quality of graduates, estimates the costs of interventions to increase the quantity of graduates and/or improve the quality of their education (taking into account resource constraints), and estimates the resulting unit cost to produce a nursing/midwifery graduate.

CapacityPlus developed and piloted an Internet-based spaced education course for health workforce leaders in Ethiopia via the innovative Qstream.com platform (previously SpacedEd.com). Qstream.com delivers spaced education by Internet or mobile smartphone and has been shown in the developed world to improve learning and change clinician behavior using a scalable model. CapacityPlus published evaluation results from the pilot in the October 2013 issue of the international journal Knowledge Management & E-Learning and later published a technical report assessing the courses. The high course completion rate and other evaluation results suggest that the Internet-based spaced education methodology is acceptable and effective for the acquisition of knowledge in a low-resource context for course participants with a clinical or public health background and moderately reliable Internet access.

Photo by Charles Harris, courtesy of IntraHealth International