From Monday, 20 to Friday, 24 February, 2023 in Ouagadougou, a training session was held for 06 interviewers to familiarize them with the methodology, questionnaires and electronic survey forms for health facilities and health providers.

With funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, EVIHDAF is conducting an evaluation of two High Impact Practices (HIPs) in family planning in Burkina Faso: Immediate Postpartum Family Planning (IPFP) and Mass Media (MM), with oversight from FHI360.

EVIHDAF’s local partner in the implementation of this evaluation in Burkina Faso is the “Institut Supérieur des Sciences de la Population (ISSP) in Ouagadougou”, which is organizing, among other things, data collection operations to improve measurement, monitoring, and decision-making in the implementation and development of these two IHP in Burkina Faso. As part of the data collection operations related to the IPFP, two quantitative surveys are planned: a survey of health facilities implementing the IPFP and a survey of health providers within these health facilities. It is thus in this light, that training organized from February 20^th – 24^th, 2023 was primarily conducted for this project, by 03 members of the ISSP evaluation team at the University of Ouagadougou: Dr. Yentema Onadja, Assistant Professor, Dr. Maurice Sawadogo, Researcher and Daouda Silga, Data Manager. This exercise provided an opportunity to harmonize the understandings of the surveyors and to master the work procedure in order to ensure the quality of the data collected from the start of the field phase. Aware of the need to respect the code of ethics in research, a full day of the training was used to train and then test the participants’ knowledge of these important issues.

Throughout the 05 days training, the ISSP team worked closely with EVIHDAF to make necessary updates to the collection tools and electronic forms deployed via the KoboToolBox platform. A major phase of this training session was the 4th day which consisted of a real-life application of the data collection to be carried out. A pre-test was conducted in three health facilities in the Baskuy health district (Ouagadougou Centre Region) to ensure that the program was functioning properly and to establish the appropriate questioning method. The lessons acquired during this phase have helped prepare the 06 investigators for the next field phase, which began on March 1, 2023.