The Capacity Project/Namibia recently hired a local human resources information systems (HRIS) advisor, Laticha Walters, to work directly with stakeholders to ensure adherence to the Project-funded HRIS-strengthening activity plan.

Voices from the Capacity Project

Imagine you’re a health-sector manager faced with competing priorities for your country’s valuable human resources for health (HRH). You need data to help you make the most effective decisions, yet the information you seek is not easy to find—and not always easy to understand. “Often looking at the data, I was not quite sure what to do exactly,” admits one health manager in Swaziland. Another manager laments that trying to gather information “was a nightmare because the data was not readily available, not well analyzed and often wrong.”

The Capacity Project has been helping to strengthen human resources information systems (HRIS) in several African countries, and many of the systems are now able to produce useful reports about the health workforce. “Now we’re in the stage where we should start using [HRH] information for planning, for policy-making, for evidence for decisions,” observes Dr. Eddie Mukooyo, chair of the Uganda Health Workforce Advisory Board. But this hasn’t always been feasible. As one manager confesses, “I did not bother to collect data before but just made requests for posts without [consulting the] database.”