Quality assurance of MELR for saving lives in Sierra Leone programme

The Issue

The Saving Lives in Sierra Leone (SLiSL) programme, funded by the UK Department for International Development, seeks to save women’s and children’s lives by improving the quality, availability and accessibility of reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health services. Montrose has been contracted as the independent Monitoring, Evidence, Learning and Review provider of the programme.

Tropical Health was commissioned to provide Quality Assurance services for complex data analysis for M&E and operational research as well as quality assurance for operational research proposal development and research methods.

Our Approach

During the quality assurance process, Tropical Health conducted a review of the programme M&E framework, overarching logframe, nested logframes, and proposed theory of change. A technical review was carried out on samples of health data analysis reports as well as several operational research protocols and reports, e.g. on adolescent health and disability. More recently, Tropical Health was requested to quality assure a major synthesis exercise to provide the evidence to support a costed extension for SLiSL, with a sharper focus on preventing maternal, neonatal and child deaths and adolescent pregnancy in the context of COVID-19 recovery phase.

Our Findings

Tropical Health conducted its quality assurance with a view to ensuring the best possible M&E data analysis and operational research proposal process, keeping in mind the goal of the five-year programme, which is to achieve a sustainable change in health outcomes for under-fives, adolescents, pregnant women and mothers.