Further incompatibilities of international health care and partisan politics

Below is the first page of the form that PEPFAR (the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, which I have talked about before) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) require all clinics receiving American funding to fill out each quarter and then again at the end of the year. The page that I'm presenting to you is included in the section designated 'Prevention.' I ask you, please take a look at the metrics being asked for in this reporting form.


As a budding Monitoring and Evaluations specialist, I now find these questions even more infuriating than I would have before. Partisan politics and political agendas aside, collecting these sorts of numbers from each clinic contributes ABSOLUTELY NO VALUE when measuring the efficacy/impact of an HIV clinic or evaluating programmatic strengths and weaknesses. Clearly my ranting will have no impact on this sad state of affairs whatsoever, but I just thought I would share my personal distaste for the strings attached to the (ultimately, extremely beneficial) funding provided by the US government to combat HIV/AIDS in the developing world.