5.3 Final scenario and assessment

This final assessment draws upon concepts from across the course. It is set up around a hypothetical scenario and will provide an opportunity for you to consider strategies and next steps that can inform learning in your own context as well.

Scenario: You are a consultant to a lower-middle-income country that wants to strengthen its learning capacity. It has a lot of data from routine sources, research, and a recent effort to digitize health records, but these data are “owned” and stored in many different databases and locations and are not well coordinated. The country also has several disease- and programme-specific working groups and think tanks, and the government has recently been investing in leadership development for promising young staff in its public sector health programmes. Further, the local governance structures have set up mechanisms to get community and civil society inputs on where barriers and challenges lie as well as to identify areas of strong performance and innovations that can potentially be scaled up and further strengthened. Finally, the Ministry of Education has been tasked with reviewing curricula for the health workforce, particular for management training and graduate training in monitoring and evaluation and research methods.

Despite a lot of recent efforts, the country is not seeing as much immediate impact as it had hoped. Many stakeholders are frustrated that their efforts are not well coordinated or that critical feedback loops or strategies to ensure that all of the different components work together well are missing.

Your charge: So far, the country does not have a vision or a strategy for how to integrate, organize, and harness the potential opportunities for learning that are partially in existence. They are looking to you for guidance on where to start and how different stakeholders should be contributing. Consider the specific questions that the country has for you below. While this fictitious context likely has some differences to your own context, also consider how you might approach answering similar questions about how to further a learning agenda in your own context as you complete this final course assessment.