ICF/CEDARS completes work with EGPAF

Over the past three years, ICF/CEDARS has been supporting various different aspects of the Elizabeth Pediatric AIDS Foundation’s (EGPAF) transition monitoring efforts for their CDC-supported PEPFAR program, Project HEART (Help Expand Antiretroviral Therapy to children and families). This month marks the successful completion of both Project HEART and the technical support from CEDARS (the end-of-project report and more information on Project HEART can be found at: http://www.pedaids.org/ProjectHEART).

As part of the PEPFAR Track 1.0 treatment initiative, this eight-year project was launched in Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, Tanzania, and Mozambique in an effort to scale up ART through existing organizations implementing PMTCT (prevention of mother-to-child transmission). A core goal of Project HEART was to transition care and treatment activities to local partners in a sustainable way.

EGPAF contracted ICF/CEDARS to provide technical assistance in 1) the development of a plan for this transition, 2) the design and development of tailor-made data collection tools to measure progress in this transition process: the Organizational Capacity and Viability Assessment Tool (OCVAT), the Site Capacity Profile (SCP) for facility level assessments, CBO Capacity Profile for local organizations providing ARV treatment support, and a service delivery site mapping inventory, 3) the design and development of a training curriculum for country programs on program design for sustainable health outcomes, based on the Taking the Longview Sustainability Planning Manual.

The fruits of this productive collaboration between EGPAF and ICF/CEDARS will be posted on the CEDARS website over the course of the next few weeks—keep any eye for them!

Watch this video about the impact of Project HEART:

Living Proof: A Father and Son Love Story from EGPAF on Vimeo.

Ontological Measurement

Great op-ed in the NYT today:

There are two kinds of measurement: ontic--meaning finding out how big or small a thing is using a scale, beginning point and unit; and ontological--more of an experience than an act, when we sense that things don't "measure up" to what they could be. The argument is that anything complex cannot be described through ontic measures, though we may think we have perfected them. We are tempted to seek all meaning through ontic measuring, perhaps because we have not made similar gains in developing ontological measurement methods.

This has implications for how we approach measuring progress toward sustainability, especially as we describe it as relationships in a complex system. Are scales and indices appropriate to describe something like "community capacity"? Can it be measured empirically? Is such an exercise worthwhile? Or should we pursue an ontological method?