DUSHANBE, December 21, 2012, Asia-Plus -- The European Union is funding a new project “Technical Assistance to Support the Strengthening of the Health Information System” in Tajikistan.

According to press release issued by the European Union Delegation to Tajikistan, the EUR 3.4 million project will last for 42 months and is being implemented by EPOS Health Management (Germany) in consortium with ICON-Institute Public Sector (Germany), Oslo University (Norway) and IrfatC (Tajikistan).

Sharing information about the health status of the population and the status of delivery of health services within the country will enable senior managers within the health system to make better decisions for better health of the population.  Within this frame the project aims to contribute to the improvement of collecting health data throughout the country to support informed decision making, better understanding of the performance of the health sector and better use of resources.

The project will focus on the roll-out of a country-wide electronic reporting system.  This requires the integration of key data sources from within the health sector as well as data about births and deaths into a national data warehouse. For the use and usefulness of any information the quality of the data is crucial.  The project will support this with awareness raising efforts and a capacity building strategy that is targeted at national, oblast and rayon levels throughout Tajikistan. Finally, the project will link the availability of quality information with the processes of planning and monitoring and evaluation at the central level.  A more systematic use of information in mainstream organizational processes of planning, budgeting, monitoring and evaluation is the aim.

The Ministry of Health of Tajikistan will be the lead partner among the project beneficiaries, with the Republican Center of Statistics and Medical Information as the main responsible entity for the collection of data.  The Ministry of Justice and the Civil Registration Office are mandated to register births and death and will, thus, be another key beneficiary of the project.  The Agency of Statistics under the President Office, responsible for official Government statistics, is a further target group of the project.