Tricky tracking of education now solved!
Almost everyone involved in rabies elimination efforts undertakes rabies education activities, but the issue has been that it has always been extremely difficult to demonstrate any impact of those activities. How can people easily show donors or their partners what work they have done with the resources they have? How can organizations justify asking for more money to support education initiatives when it is so difficult to show what kind of impact or reach it may have made?
We have created a solution for you!
The Rabies Epidemiological Bulletin (REB) currently consists of multiple different tools that have been designed to serve a very specific purpose. These tools help any person interested in rabies elimination (governments, private sector, NGOs, or individuals) to track i) dog vaccinations and sterilizations, ii) dog population estimates, iii) animal and human rabies cases, iv) bite cases, and v) PEP compliance, and many other key aspects of rabies surveillance. There is, however, one avenue that was not covered by the REB tools – this was the tracking of education initiatives to capture critical information about where education initiatives have taken place, who the target audience was, and what the key messages were. With GARC’s newest addition to the suite of surveillance tools in the REB, all this can easily be captured!
The Education Initiative Tracker (EIT) is here!
The Education Initiative Tracker (EIT) tool will help people to collect information relating to the impact and reach of their education or awareness work. Education and awareness activities are often difficult to quantify, and the number of people reached is often recorded retrospectively when reporting to stakeholders. However, we believe that education and awareness initiatives can be used more effectively to determine their impact on rabies elimination efforts.
KAP (Knowledge, Attitude and Practice) surveys are typically done in larger programs to determine the impact of rabies education initiatives, but these take a long time, additional resources, and are sometimes difficult to undertake. In addition, these usually only anecdotally determine the impact of the education work on the rabies situation. But, because the EIT tool forms part of the suite of GARC’s surveillance tools, you can quantify the impact of your education initiatives based on bite case and rabies cases in an area for example – this is because all the GARC surveillance tools work perfectly together to provide you with a complete picture of rabies in your community.
Case example:
A user may be using the Bite Case Tracker tool to track the number of bite cases in a community, of which, they have noted an increasing trend in numbers of provoked bite incidents. They then implement an education campaign relating to bite prevention at schools and communities. With the EIT tool, they would be able to track the number of people educated regarding bite prevention and can overlay this information on the same graphs and maps as the number of bite cases. Therefore, after the initiation of the education interventions, a noticeable decrease in the number of provoked bite cases reported in a community can be observed.
This is just one example of how the tool can be used to help you in your efforts! So, get in touch now and we can get you set up with the newest EIT tool!
Article contributed by Dr Terence Scott (GARC)