Projects: Collaborate.Health
Quality Improvement in Rwanda
A Quality Improvement Approach to Improving Financial Management
- Agency Partner
- Health Alert Volunteers
- Course
- Program Implementation for Global Health
Overview
Health Alert Volunteers (HAV) is a young local Rwandan NGO established three years ago and currently operating with a small budget funded mainly through member contributions and in-kind donations from collaborations. HAV runs several preventive health programs for people living with HIV, including special campaigns and events.
HAV has been developing their financial management system over time but is interested in further developing processes and procedures to improve its financial management. Particularly, its filing system for financial documents. HAV’s current financial system includes event request forms, cash/check requisition and team meetings to discuss budget.
Challenge
HAV needs improvement in the process of filing and tracking financial documents that includes system improvement and training for their financial filing system and other managerial processes.
Solution
Working collaboratively with HAV Team ZIMA created a process map of HAV’s current system for collecting and storing financial information, made recommendations for developing a quality improvement process that HAV could use to improve filing of financial documents and other management processes, and created an illustrative example of how the quality improvement process and tools could be used to improve the filing system for financial documents.
Results
New financial management processes and managerial procedures supported by newly designed forms for financial management and a training guide for continuous quality improvement will provide an opportunity to engage in continuous improvement of HAV’s financial management system.
Project Timeline
This project took seven months to complete from kick-off meeting to presentation of final deliverables. Click the button below for a detailed timeline.
View Project TimelineThank you for your support! My team lives in the situation where every day is a day to learn and learning is the only way to change. Change with time can predict the public health and community health we want.
Student Spotlight
Grace Robbins
Grace is pursuing her MPH while working part-time as a Mental Health Promotion Graduate Assistant. She graduated from Cornell University in 2016 with a BA in Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies and minors in Global Health, Inequality Studies, and South Asian Studies. Grace has experience working internationally as a member of a multicultural and multilingual team when she conducted qualitative research in Nepal on women’s and girls’ experiences with menstruation and its associated exclusionary practices. Currently, she is doing her practicum in Guatemala. In her spare time, Grace enjoys dancing, reading, and going on adventures in her new hometown of Boston; she also loves to travel whenever she can.
Grace’s reflection on working on Team ZIMA for Program Implementation for Global Health
When I started this class fourteen weeks ago, I was an excited but nervous student with no experience in the field of consulting. When Team ZIMA started this class fourteen weeks ago, we were seven individuals, largely new to one another, with a mishmash of experiences and personalities. However, I think all of us had positive premonitions early on about where we were going together. I still remember our first roundtable conversation, wherein we shared our desire to try, fail, and grow together as a team. I do not know if any one of us knew just how well we would live up to that shared goal. Today, as this class comes to a close, I can see how much I have grown as an individual and we have grown as a team. I am now a student consultant who feels quietly confident in my ability to handle any challenge thrown at her. And Team ZIMA is now a dedicated and smoothly functioning team, whose members know without a doubt that we can rely upon each other’s support, expertise, and energy to create anything and adapt in any circumstance.
Team Zima
Team Zima in Action
