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AFGHANISTAN: DEMONSTRATION COMMUNITY-BASED SOCIAL AUDIT OF HEALTH SERVICES IN TWO DISTRICTS, 2008 |
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Demonstration Community-Based Social Audit of Health Services in Two Districts of Afghanistan, 2008
Among the many challenges of Afghanistan’s health system is the lack of reliable information. The rapid shifts in the security situation, scarcity of funding and skilled human resources and competing claims on the allegiance of the population make it all the more important to have good evidence on which to make critical decisions.
Health authorities need to know who is and is not being reached by the existing services, how are they performing on the ground, what is the experience of health service users, how satisfied are they, which services need fixing the most, and much more. The only reliable way of getting the answers to such questions is by going to the communities and asking.
This project demonstrates how these questions can be answered by periodic community social audits of the health services. For more information on CIET’s social audit methods, click here.
The Minsitry of Public Health chose two health districts for the demonstration. CIET and its Afghan counterparts surveyed of some 3,600 households and interviewed key informants in a random sample of communities in the two districts. The next step is to return this preliminary evidence to the participating communities for their interpretation and recommendations.
Once the project team has analyzed the data together with the communities and the health authorities, there will be:
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meetings with civil society representatives and government authorities to discuss the evidence;
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a formal assessment of the delivery and performance of public services in the health sector, from both community and service perspectives;
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an identification of bottlenecks in delivery of health services;
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strategies for communicating the evidence to civil society, service workers and decision makers at the provincial and national levels;
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an inventory of the capacities that need to be developed for rolling out a stakeholder information system based on the social audit process.
This demonstration social audit began in early 2008 and is being funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC).
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