Publications

Capacity-building is key to sustainable development efforts. For all the right reasons, over the past decades it has also enjoyed considerable attention in the field of health and development. However, perspectives on what capacity-building means, what it intends to achieve and which strategies are most effective differ, depending on the context and the perspectives of a variety of stakeholders. This book aims to contribute to conceptual reflection but mostly to share experiences regarding a range of capacity-building approaches in different contexts that have in common that they are situated outside formal lecture hall settings and intend to contribute to knowledge generation.

“At the health centres, you are asked many questions like: ‘Have you given birth, what is your age, whom do you live with, are you in your menses…?” a respondent said. “But in the chemist, you are injected without questions,” another said. And yet another respondent said: “In chemists it is business.” “You only say what you came for, are told to lie down and injected without questions in the chemists,” another respondent said.

We developed and piloted a methodology to establish TB related work load at primary care level for clinical and laboratory staff. Workload is influenced by activities to be implemented, time to perform them, their frequency and patient load. Of particular importance is the patient pathway for diagnosis and treatment and the frequency of clinic visits. Using observation with checklists, clocking, interviews and review of registers, allows assessing the contribution of different factors on the workload.