With funding and support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), AfHEA has been working closely with an external organization, Humentum https://www.humentum.org/ to assess the organizational effectiveness and sustainability of the association. This work is now drawing to a close. The draft report, which will be to the Board in the new year, identified AfHEA’s key strengths as well as areas requiring improvements, and made many recommendations to strengthen the association’s effectiveness and financial sustainability so as to position it for success in the rapidly evolving health landscape.

The assessment looked at eight key domains, namely: Leadership & Governance, Membership, Program Delivery, Partnerships & Networks, Staffing & Technical Capacity, Financial Capacity & Information Technology, Resource Mobilization, and Branding & Advocacy.

The work involved a rapid self-assessment exercise, interviews with AfHEA’s stakeholders (both internal and external), members’ survey, desk review as well as a stakeholder landscaping analysis. The assessment culminated in a roadmap that was jointly agreed upon by AfHEA and Humentum and that AfHEA would implement moving forward to strengthen its operational effectiveness and enhance its financial sustainability.

The exercise was designed to be carried out in phases. Phase 1 activities included kick-off call meeting between AfHEA and Humentum to familiarize with one another and to discuss the approach for carrying out the exercise, Inception meeting to discuss requirements for carrying out the exercise, key dates for key activities and timelines, desk review exercise, and the rapid self-assessment exercise.

The Phase two activities included the membership survey to obtain viewpoints of a sample of AfHEA members to feed into the exercise, AfHEA’s internal and external key stakeholders’ interviews to obtain their view points and incorporate into the operational effectiveness and sustainability analysis, a virtual facilitated assessment of AfHEA that happened over about four days.

The Phase 3 or the wrap up activities include development of a roadmap for implementation of the recommendations of the operational effectiveness and sustainability work and the start of the implementation of roadmap activities.