The National AIDS Commission (NAC) of Malawi was established as a public trust to lead and coordinate the National Response to HIV and AIDS. Since 2001, NAC has put in place management, financial, and monitoring systems for effective coordination and has mobilized funding from a number of bilateral and multi-lateral sources to scale up responses to HIV and AIDS.
The NAC M&E system
Effective coordination of the National Response depends to a large extent on NAC’s ability to monitor what is happening on the ground, analyse it for strategic implications and feed it back into outreach and promotional programs aimed at addressing weaknesses or exploiting opportunities identified through the monitoring effort. Consequently, NAC has developed a comprehensive monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system, which is reviewed and updated on a regular basis. In addition to the monitoring reports, the NAC also conducts annual qualitative assessments of programme implementation, in order to complement the quantitative information that flows from various partners, and to provide a strategic sense of trends and areas requiring particular attention.
Our role
To this end, NAC has contracted Itad to mobilise an independent review team of multi-disciplinary specialists to assess NSP management and implementation and provide a report for discussion by NAC and funding partners.
This is the third set of annual reviews to be conducted by Itad. For each annual review, we mobilise a multi-disciplinary team including both International and Malawian experts, all of whom spend up to three weeks in country for each separate annual review.
The aim of the review
The chief objective of the reviews is to provide NAC and its partners with an independent assessment of performance in implementing the integrated annual work plan against the National HIV M&E Framework and budget.
The report generated provides NAC and its partners with feedback on selected themes critical to achieving program objectives, including lessons from international experience. Each review identifies successful approaches that merit expansion and scaling up as well as areas needing particular attention. Finally, each review assesses progress made with regard to findings/recommendations of previous independent review missions.
Image © Malawi. Photo Credit: Emma Newbatt
