Guide to Monitoring and Evaluating Knowledge Management in Global Health Programs [with Case Example Series]

"In a world where virtually all global health professionals are practicing KM (consciously or not), it is more important than ever to put its importance into context and gauge its contribution to health systems."

This guide from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Global Health Knowledge Collaborative (GHKC) attempts to demystify issues and challenges that may surface when designing knowledge management (KM) activities and measuring specific types of KM approaches by providing answers to common questions such as "What is knowledge?", "What is KM?", "What are KM activities?", and "Why is KM important in global public health?" It includes a logic model and 42 common indicators to measure the process, reach, usefulness, and learning/action outcomes of KM activities in the context of global health and development programmes. It also provides instruments to measure the contribution of KM activities to health policy and programme outputs and outcomes and examples of their use. The goal is to help KM professionals, communication staff, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) staff, and programme managers to assess and demonstrate how KM contributes to the learning and performance of intended audiences, health system improvement, healthy behaviours, and, ultimately, health outcomes.

In exploring the relevance of KM, the authors of the guide note that, to reach health and development goals, "we need to continually identify knowledge, capture it, synthesize it, share it with various counterparts, help them to use it, and help to collect and share the new knowledge generated by that experience." Knowledge can be either explicit or tacit: "The global nature of the health community makes it necessary to meet the challenge of converting valuable tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge so that it can be shared around the world." KM activities in global health seek to collect knowledge, to connect people to the knowledge they need, and to facilitate learning before, during, and after programme implementation. KM activities in global health can be classified into 4 categories: (i) products and services; (ii) publications and resources; (iii) training and events; and (iv) approaches and techniques.

The guide consists of 5 sections. The first section provides an introduction and background to the field of KM, the application of KM as an intervention, and the logic model that depicts the theory of change associated with KM activities. It also includes the full list of KM indicators, organised by the elements of the logic model. Following the introduction, chapters are devoted to describing each key element of the logic model and the associated indicators, as follows: Processes, Outputs, and Initial Outcomes. These chapters are further divided into sections that group similar indicators. Each indicator includes a definition, data requirements, data sources, purposes and issues, and examples. Appendices highlight specialised areas in KM, e.g., Web analytics, usability testing, and communities of practice.

Three years after the guide was published, GHKC began embarking on revising the guide, noting that a lot had changed since its release, including: fast-changing innovations in social interaction; renewed interest on implementing and measuring intentional collaboration, learning and adaptation; and reaffirmed donor focus on multidisciplinary collaboration across M&E, communications, applied research, organisational development, change management, and KM. GHKC asked: How has the guide been used? How has it not been used? Why? Published in May 2017, the GHKC Case Example Series (also available as a Tumblr site) provides insights from different agencies using the guide to measure specific KM approaches used in their health programmes or initiatives. You may access the case studies directly as follows:

• Measuring Technical Exchange Networks (TENs) at MSH [Management Sciences for Health]
• How Pathfinder International Uses the Guide to Monitoring and Evaluating KM in Global Health Programs
• Learning to Evaluate a Facebook Group: How Does Social Media Foster Communities of Practice?
• Implementing and Monitoring an Organizational Knowledge Management Strategy at EngenderHealth
• Indicators in K4Health's Guide for Making Content Meaningful

GHKC welcomes people to let them know if there are unique ways they are using the guide that can inform revision efforts.