HIV This Week

Nu'man J, King W, Bhalakia A, Criss S. A Framework for building organizational capacity integrating planning, monitoring, and evaluation. J Public Health Manag Pract 2007;13(Suppl 1):S24-S32.

HIV prevention organisations are increasingly adopting more intensive and evidence-based strategies with the goal of protecting targeted populations from HIV infection or transmission. Thus, capacity building has moved to the forefront as a set of activities necessary to enable HIV prevention organizations to plan, implement, monitor, and evaluate prevention programs and services. Cost-effective approaches to the provision of capacity building assistance traditionally use strategies that compromise efficaciousness and more intensive approaches can be cost prohibitive. In addition, traditional approaches treat programme planning and implementation and programme monitoring and evaluation as two separate entities, even though they are interdependent aspects of an efficient and effective service delivery system. Nu’man and colleagues describe a framework for building sustainable organisational capacity that combines high- and low-intensity approaches; integrates programme planning, monitoring, and evaluation; and focuses on building understanding of the value of appropriate organisational change. The authors used the described framework over a 3-year period with 52 community-based organisations funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and organizations funded by CDC-funded health departments. The authors describe lessons learned and make recommendations for building long-term sustainability, organisational change at various levels, and the need to develop standardised indicators to measure changes in organisational capacity.