Improving Health and Well-being at the Nyabirehe Primary School in Rwanda
December 16, 2020
Aga Bereznicka, Anna Petterson, Hailey Noble, Lauren Schmidt, and Themla Wadie put on their GH743 consulting hats to work closely with the exciting NGO, Move Up Global, helping the organization to overcome several different program management barriers.
Move Up Global is an NGO that looks to engage resource-poor Rwandan communities in generating solutions to address persistent gaps in people’s health and well-being. Their overarching mission is to improve access to better health and education through fostering community engagement. Leveraging their partnership with local communities, they work to improve the quality of education and explore opportunities for professional development. Poverty remains a major cause of poor school performance and high dropout rates but the NGO is working hard to mitigate these issues.
Move Up Global’s current and future priorities include English language support, teacher coaching programs, education systems improvement, and student/teacher performance improvement. The organization uses the Applied Health Model to work towards its goals as it integrates basic health sciences into education and prepares students to address major public health challenges such as the prevention of neglected tropical diseases, menstrual health, emergency preparedness, water sanitation, and malaria. Social entrepreneurship is at the heart of their theory of change and MUG has future priorities to have a hands-on entrepreneurship enrichment program.
Over the course of the semester, the GH 743 team provided Move Up Global with consulting reports and deliverables covering five different program management topics: human resource management, quality improvement, health management and information systems, supply chain management, and financial management. Several examples of products produced include charts of comparable organizations for their human resource efforts; a quality improvement guide for their health education programs; paper and digital health passport interventions; standard operating procedures for selection, procurement, transportation, managing inventory, and tracing use of inventory; and recommendations on funding strategies, potential grant opportunities, and tools for organization or potential and current funding mechanisms.
During their tenure as consultants, the team provided Move Up Global with a myriad of tools and recommendations to help them scale up their organization and ultimately reach more communities. As they expand, they will continue to impact the lives of the children of the Nyabirehe Primary School, and in turn improve the health and wellbeing of the whole community.
The team hopes that the deliverables they developed will be useful and help improve the learning experience of NPS students, carry out regular health education and screening programs, and facilitate referrals to health facilities when necessary; overall creating a healthier student body that can thrive academically.