There are two ministries involved in the project. They are the Ministry of Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children of Tanzania and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. Also the Finnish Christian Medical Society has a centric role in the project.
The Ministry of Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children of Tanzania
The Ministry of Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children of Tanzania (MoH) has published a Digital Health Strategy for the years 2019-2024. They have asked the eHealth project to support them with the implementation. The representatives of the ministry have actively participated in the workshops and informed the project about their plans and targets. In turn, the project team has followed the guidelines and the requirements of the ministry to ensure that all the developments are in line with the government strategies.
Walter Ndesanjo, the ICT specialist of MoH, presented the development plans of the ministry in the area of eHealth.
Web pages of MoH: https://www.moh.go.tz/en/
The ministry Strategic plans: Strategic Plans (moh.go.tz)
The ministry Guidelines: Guidelines (moh.go.tz)
One of the strategic goals of the ministry is to encourage healthcare service providers to improve the data quality and to use the results of data analysis for their own planning and decision making. The project has promoted the goal by arranging a series of business intelligence workshops for the stakeholders, e.g. the management and the IT specialists.
The aim is to provide the participants a comprehensive understanding of the business analytics and the required skills needed in the implementation of the BI solutions. In addition, the workshop series has been targeted to teachers and students of Tanzanian universities for spreading the know-how further.
The Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland
The eHealth project is mainly funded by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland (MFA) as one of its NGO development collaboration projects. Project support for Finnish NGOs is an important form of civil society development cooperation and part of Finland’s development policy implementation.
According to the Guidelines for Civil Society in Development Policy (2017), strengthening civil society is both a development policy objective and a means to promote Finland’s other development policy objectives and the goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Project support also promotes Finland’s foreign policy objectives, such as the implementation of human rights policy objectives.
Web pages of MFA: https://um.fi/frontpage
Guidelines for Civil Society in Development Policy (2017) :
The Finnish Christian Medical Society
The Finnish Christian Medical Society (FCMS) is a traditional association for medical doctors and students. It was founded in 1923. One of its goals is to participate in the health mission and in the international social work done by a church. Since 1980’s FCMS has had many development collaboration projects, supported by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. In the 21th century educational and consultancy work have raised to a big role in the development collaboration projects.
FCMS acts as the owner of the eHealth project. It administers it as one of its health mission projects. Also part of the funding comes from the FCMS. The administration includes the financial administration and the steering of the project, for example.
