Fighting Malaria Together Newsletter - December 2010
Senegal Completes its first Malaria Program Review
by Dr. Pape Thior
Dr. Pape Thior, coordinator of Senegal’s Malaria Control Programme, discusses Senegal’s experiences in conducting their first Malaria Programme Review (MPR).
Describe your experience in conducting your first MPR.
Senegal has conducted programme reviews in the past, but we found the MPR developed by WHO to be much more methodical, better structured, well thought-out and providing a deeper level of analysis.
Was it a valuable exercise for your team to conduct? Why or why not?
Conducting the MPR was valuable for our team. The team worked together for six months, and really learned how to analyze their strengths and weaknesses, our organizational structure, and operating environment. We have a particular management philosophy—we always try to regard any challenges we may encounter as opportunities, which helps us improve performance and facilitates implementation. The MPR fed into that by using the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis to help us analyze our strengths, weaknesses, and threats and turn them into opportunities for moving our programme forward in the next five years.
What sorts of lessons learned did you take away from the process? Did you face any challenges?
The timing was extremely difficult for us—we were conducting the MPR while simultaneously developing our next national strategic plan and working on a Global Fund Round 10 grant proposal. I admit that I was skeptical—our planning team was in Johannesburg until August, and I was worried we might not meet all of our deadlines. But thanks to the strength of our dedicated partnership at both the national and local levels, we were able to move mountains. Our team proved to be competent and well structured, working on these three large-scale projects simultaneously. Also enormously helpful was the political support and leadership and efficiency demonstrated by the ministry. Having a ministry of health that is able to sign things and move them along without delay is really helpful and will be important for other countries planning to implement MPRs.
How will information obtained from the MPR inform future work?
The MPR clearly identified areas of Senegal’s malaria control programme that need to be strengthened, including the national system and our monitoring and evaluation systems. Monitoring and evaluation is particularly important if you are aiming to reach pre-elimination and we hope that, with technical support from our partners, we will be able to improve these systems.
What are some things you might do differently next time you implement an MPR?
I would do the same things again. I would change nothing. I am very satisfied with the way things went.
Is there any advice you would give colleagues implementing an MPR for the first time?
The WHO has developed a consensus-based tool, which allows for optimizing the use of the MPR. The tool is available on the WHO website.