title: Assessment of a tool for measuring non-profit advocacy efforts in India, Uganda and Yemen.
abstract: To improve maternal and child health, the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood (WRA) implemented an innovative policy advocacy project in India, Uganda and Yemen from 2009 to 2011. PATH assisted WRA in designing an approach to measure the short- and long-term results of WRA's advocacy efforts.Expert rating instruments have been widely used since 1970s to track country-level program efforts focusing on family planning, maternal and neonatal health, and HIV/AIDS. This article assesses and establishes the strength and applicability of an expert rating tool, the Maternal Health Policy Score (MHPS), in measuring and guiding a non-profit's advocacy efforts.The tool was assessed using five criteria: validity of results, reproducibility of results, acceptability to respondents, internal consistency and cost. The tool proved effective for measuring improvements in the policy environment at both the national and subnational levels that the non-profit intended to effect and useful for identifying strong and weak policy domains. The results are reproducible, though ensuring fidelity in implementation during different rounds of data collection may be difficult. The acceptability of the tool was high among respondents, and also among users of the information.MHPS provides a quick, low-cost method to measure overall changes in the policy environment, giving advocacy organizations and grant makers timely information to gauge the influence of their work and take corrective action. WRA demonstrated the use of MHPS at multiple points in the project: at the onset of a project to identify and strategize around policy domains that need attention, during and at the end of the project to monitor progress made and redirect efforts.
authors.affiliation: Monitoring and Evaluation, PATH, 280 Utah Avenue, Suite 250, South San Francisco, CA 94080, USA tlalwani@path.org.
authors.forename: Tanya
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Lalwani
authors.affiliation: Monitoring and Evaluation, PATH, 2201 Westlake Avenue, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98121, USA.
authors.forename: Julie Knoll
authors.initials: JK
authors.lastname: Rajaratnam
authors.affiliation: Monitoring and Evaluation, PATH, 2201 Westlake Avenue, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98121, USA.
authors.forename: Jordan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: McOwen
authors.affiliation: White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood, One Thomas Circle NW, Suite 200 Washington, D.C. 20005 USA.
authors.forename: Deborah J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Gordis
authors.affiliation: White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood, One Thomas Circle NW, Suite 200 Washington, D.C. 20005 USA.
authors.forename: Lisa A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Bowen
authors.affiliation: Monitoring and Evaluation, PATH, 2201 Westlake Avenue, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98121, USA.
authors.forename: Jeff
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bernson
mesh_terms: D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D003625:Data Collection; D006291:Health Policy; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D000068101:Maternal-Child Health Services / Q000191:economics; D010344:Patient Advocacy; D015397:Program Evaluation / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014454:Uganda; D015006:Yemen
keywords: advocacy; maternal health; measurement