Aid effectiveness principle Assessment of Kuunika’s implementation experience

harmonise their action address the current stated 'extreme fragmentation' of donor partner inputs to health

● Kuunika support to the development and staffing of the MoH Digital Health Division represents a springboard for greater GoM/donor partner harmonization specific to digital health; more effort is required to realize such potential

● Potentially: Kuunika may have generated added value that has enabled other partners to support digital data, e.g. the Global Fund.

4. MANAGING FOR RESULTS: Developing countries and donors should focus on measurable results

5. MUTUAL ACCOUNTABILITY

Developing countries and their partners are jointly accountable for development results

● Digital data collection, analysis and use remains weak at District and lower levels, despite major inputs from Kuunika and other partners: evidence-based results management is nascent at best

● Knowledge culture: optimizing results in the digital data landscape requires genuine and sustained buy-in by individuals and institutions to the principle that data matter and their use can and should improve planning and service delivery. If Kuunika were able to support all health system levels to develop a results-centered data use culture, this could have substantial impact on performance

● This continues to be poor. As at the baseline, so too in 2021: data are vertically extracted by both MoH + donor partner projects from Districts + Health Facilities, with too little discussion, feedback, wider dissemination

● Therefore, Districts and below appear to be the 'missing middle' in terms of accountability (in both respects, i.e. holding others to account + being held accountable - although for the latter, as ever Data Clerks bear the brunt of data entry accountability)

Of note here is that the aid effectiveness principles have been criticized for gender and equity blindness, as having a certain 'one size fits all' approach to such matters.

In the case of digital data and Kuunika (and indeed all other partners working in this area in Malawi), just one point is disaggregation of data - their collection, their identification, their analysis and their use. WHO, UN Women, many civil society organizations and others continue to press for greater equity of data disaggregation, greater acknowledgement that data are never neutral, and greater application of such principles in the context of digital data.