Evaluation of the tobacco control programs in Africa?

A meeting has taken place in Atlanta at the end of October to look into evaluating tobacco control programs in Africa? Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? Any guarantee of an independent process? ie not having the funders and the people receiving the money self-evaluating themselves? Any hint of the creation of objective benchmarks and a simple scorecard like the one adopted for the EU in 2007?

A meeting on monitoring and evaluation of tobacco control in Africa was held at the offices of the American Cancer society in Atlanta between 30th - 31st October 2012. It was attended by 26 representatives (names?) drawn from organisations working on tobacco control in Africa (American Cancer Society, Center for Tobacco Control in Africa, Centers for Disease Control, WHO Tobacco Free initiative, the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project from the University of Waterloo, International Development Research centre, the University of Pretoria, The International union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.

The objective of the meeting was to bring together key influencers of tobacco control policy, practice and funding in Africa to exchange their experiences in evaluating the work that they support, share ideas on how their own monitoring and evaluation efforts could be strengthened, and consider options for how we might collectively combine our respective efforts into a common Monitoring & Evaluation framework for tobacco control in Africa to facilitate synergies, compare findings and generate lessons.

During the meeting the participants discussed tobacco control as a system, and how looking at Monitoring and Evaluation from a systems perspective would enable actors in tobacco control in Africa, not just to evaluate their individual programs or activities but to acquire the entire picture of what is happening in tobacco control at a country level, at the wider health system level and an understanding of what works or doesnt work, why it works or doesnt work, for whom it works, as well as how the different interventions between all the actors in the system working on research, policy, practice, regulation, education and advocacy all contribute jointly to realising the outcome of reduced health, social and economic impacts of tobacco in Africa.

The meeting agreed on the way forward for developing a common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework for tobacco control in Africa.

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????? Tobacco control programs in Africa have been funded at significant levels since 2007 when the Bloomberg Initiative started supporting them. Millions of dollars have been disbursed without any public, independent, transparent reporting about how they were/are used. Quousque tandem?