Pilot social audit in Northern Province (Limpopo)

CIETafrica started a pilot social audit covering 1000 households in the Northern (now Limpopo) Province of South Africa. Community views of service delivery by the departments of health and welfare, education and sport, arts and culture, will feed into a citizens' report to be prepared by the premier of the province. The citizens' report will focus on quality of service delivery and efforts to improve this.

 

The project was funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) through the government of the Northern Province and Simeka Management Consulting.

Andersson N, Whitaker CE, Molungoa L, Salcedo M.,"Social Inclusion and public services in the Northern Province: Quantitative aspects of a social audit in two pilot areas", CIETafrica (Revised Draft Report) 2001 Jul. www.ciet.org (library, South Africa)

 

Andersson N, Paredes S, Ngxowa N, Matthis J., "Social audit of provincial health services: Building the community voice into planning in South Africa", Journal of Interprofessional Care 2004; 18(4): 381-390.

CIETmethods The cross design of social audit and evaluation techniques known as the CIETmethod (footnote 1) also known as sentinel community surveillance (SCS) (footnote 2) or service delivery surveys (SDS) (footnote 3) tries to maintain epidemiological coherence while introducing the results of surveys for discussion between communities and planners.

 

The method relies on a panel of sentinel communities chosen and weighted to link the sample to the universe it represents. Cyclical contacts with these sentinel sites are effectively a concentration of measurement resources in time and place, an intense focus of quantitative and qualitative methods in a panel of mini universes. The ability to repeat measurement in the same place makes impact estimation relatively straightforward. These households can be contacted in successive cycles, perhaps a year or two years later, to measure differences over the period.

 

These differences can be related to programmatic input and other factors that might be vary across different sites. The impact assessment is based on the time sequence and the heterogeneity between sites. The CIET cross-design usually involves 120 contiguous households in each site to permit the analysis of local factors in the context of household-level occurrences.

 

Some environmental factors might be quantified easily (for example, presence of school, cost of drugs) or they may be more qualitative (adequacy of sanitation, level of participation in community affairs). If these factors affect the whole cluster, comparisons can be made between clusters or groups of clusters.

 

Footnote 1. Andersson N, Martinez E, Cerrato F, Morales E and Ledogar RJ. The Use of Community-Based Data in Health Planning in Mexico and Central America. Health Policy and Planning 1989;4(3):197-206.

 

Footnote 2. Ledogar RJ and Andersson N. Impact Estimation Through Sentinel Community Surveillance: An affordable epidemiological approach. Third World Planning Review 1993;15/3:263-272.

 

Footnote3. Presidential Commission of Inquiry against Corruption: Survey of corruption in the police, judiciary, revenue and lands services. CIETinternational/EDI/CIDA: Dar es Salaam July 1996.

See CIET Methods