Evaluating Large-Scale Health Programs

Course Overview

This specialization teaches learners how to plan and implement effectiveness evaluations of large-scale health programs. It focuses on evaluating health programs in low- and middle-income countries, where routine data are less available and reliable and therefore are often not sufficient to support a rigorous evaluation. The first course, “Evaluating Public Health Programs at Scale”, provides an overview of the issues and evaluation methods in this context; it can be taken as a standalone course for those learners who want a general understanding of effectiveness evaluations. The remaining five courses all do a more comprehensive look at topics covered in the overview course. Plus, each course introduces tools that can be used in an evaluation, including generic survey instruments that can be adapted, and detailed instructions for concrete tasks such as estimating sample sizes, training and supervising surveyors, ensuring data quality, and conducting the analysis. The tools include packages that help in the design of the evaluation (course 2 ), for collecting data on quality of care and implementation strength (course 3), household surveys (course 4), and the Lives Saved Tool (LiST) for modeling impact measures (course 5), all of which are available at: https://www.radar-project.org/. The final course includes code for data cleaning and analysis for various data sets. These tools and this set of courses were funded by a grant from Government Affairs, Canada.