With an improvement culture at our core, WI-HER’s team thinks outside the box to achieve maximized results in all sectors and areas of work.
Our approach
Our approach to quality improvement identifies and designs solutions to barriers and challenges that are too often missed or overlooked in regular quality improvement work. We do this by:
Considering the entire system and environment, including relevant additional sectors that may be inhibiting or prohibiting desired results.
Embedding human-centered thinking and design into our approach.
Uncovering the inequities at the heart of poor quality services by examining factors related to gender equity, youth and social inclusion (GYSI).
WI-HER can support the design of an improvement initiative at small or wide scale, with demonstrated results for achieving sustainable, locally-led change.
Examples of our impact Through the USAID Applying Science to Strengthen and Improve Systems (ASSIST) (2013-2020) project, WI-HER applied quality improvement to improve the percentage of boys and girls that passed exams in 16 schools in Malawi from 49% to 69.5% for girls, and 51.6% to 70.8% for boys over a three-year period.
Furthermore, through ASSIST, WI-HER applied quality improvement to improve male partner involvement in the prevention of mother to child transmission in Burundi. From September 2015 to July 2016, the percentage of women who tested for HIV during antenatal care (ANC) whose partners also tested for HIV went from 50% to 90% in 15 sites. In 194 scale up sites, the percentage of pregnant women tested during ANC whose partner also tested went from 15% in May 2015 to 58% in November 2016.
And in Kenya, through the USAID Afya Nyota ya Bonde Project, eight facilities supported by WI-HER increased the identification and management of gender-based violence (GBV) survivors by 642% over 10 months of applying quality improvement. The facilities have increased the identification and management of male GBV survivors by 2,250%.
