Introducing Carie Muntifering, Monitoring, Evaluation, and Research Advisor
In September, Carie Muntifering joined IntraHealth International’s Washington, DC office as monitoring, evaluation, and research advisor for CapacityPlus.
Welcome, Carie. Please tell us a little about your background.
I have a background in research, specifically in family planning and reproductive health. I got my PhD from the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health [at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health], and there I also worked on a project called Advance Family Planning and helped with the monitoring and evaluation piece of that project. I come from a strong background in research as well. What’s a little bit unique is that I do both quantitative and qualitative research, and I enjoy them both a lot.
What aspect of your new role are you particularly excited about?
I’m really looking forward to being in Mali and doing the work there, and getting more involved in health systems strengthening. I love the fact that CapacityPlus and IntraHealth have a focus on gender and family planning/reproductive health within health systems strengthening, because those are areas I’m really interested in. Being able to integrate all those pieces will be exciting.
How did your Peace Corps experience help lead to your current job?
[I appreciated] really seeing what’s going on in the field and having such a better understanding of the challenges of improving the health workforce, and improving training and health services. Being able to see that first-hand in a rural setting…that really sparked my interest in getting back into a more applied setting [after graduate school].
What do you find especially compelling about monitoring and evaluation?
Being able to show progress quantitatively but also have the story from qualitative data to give depth and meaning to it. A neat thing about monitoring and evaluation is that people can learn from it: it often builds upon previous work, and if it’s done well and documented it can help guide future projects—rather than reinventing the wheel, we can learn from each other.
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Photo by Carol Bales
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