Mali

CapacityPlus contributed to better coordination of human resources for health (HRH) stakeholders and their efforts through its support and reinforcement of Mali’s HRH Stakeholder Leadership Group, and supported a range of country-led initiatives to increase the availability, distribution, and quality of health workers to deliver urgently needed health services, including family planning and reproductive health.

Highlights

• Improved availability, quality, and retention of health workers. CapacityPlus’s ongoing, comprehensive support to the Gao School of Nursing to increase production of newly qualified health workers and reinforce the quality of education has been critical in ensuring health workers are available to provide quality care in northern Mali. An analysis completed in June 2015 showed that the majority of health workers in the country’s three northern regions are graduates of Gao and that both students and graduates provided essential health services during the security crisis in 2012-13, as other health workers fled south. Financial support of over 200 Gao Nursing School students by CapacityPlus during 2014-15 through scholarships and payment of living expenses (using the innovative Orange mobile money payment system) ensured that even more health workers will be available to provide services in the North. Scholarship recipients were significantly more likely to pass their national certification exam (64%) compared to those who did not receive scholarships (29%). The project also implemented strategies successful in Gao at other training institutions in the south, such as training teachers and clinical mentors in andragogy.

• Evidence-based management and decision-making to equitably distribute health workers. CapacityPlus supported the Ministry of Health (MOH) HRH Directorate to introduce and scale-up decentralized use of iHRIS Manage to better track, manage, and plan for the health workforce. Recognizing the importance of iHRIS, other development partners, such as the Canadian Cooperation and World Health Organization, as well as the MOH have also supported inputs and activities in the scale-up. The HRH Directorate has used iHRIS to identify experienced supervisors for deployment to a new health center in Bamako, to determine the distribution of health workers in at-risk areas during Mali’s Ebola outbreak, and to track health workers who had fled from the northern regions during the armed conflict in order to offer grants to return to the north. After seeing iHRIS pilot results, the Sikasso region implemented a rotation system for midwives and recruited additional health workers after analysis of iHRIS data noted a lack of service providers in rural areas.

• Reinforced capacity and quality of health workers to manage cases of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). CapacityPlus’s support to the development and dissemination of SGBV training materials has increased the technical knowledge of health workers who are often victims’ first point of contact, and also helped local organizations provide more targeted and effective psychosocial support. Further, the trainings resulted in the creation of a network spanning from community-based organizations to hospitals that facilitates communication and ensures that victims receive the treatment and support they need.
  
  Photo by Trevor Snapp, courtesy of IntraHealth International