PSP Ethiopia: Financial Management Training provided for more than 120 Ethiopian Private Health Providers
The Abt Associates-led and USAID-funded Private Sector Program in Ethiopia (PSP-E) organized a training program on financial management, bookkeeping and financial reporting for over 120 private clinics operating in Oromiya and Amhara Regions and Addis Ababa. The initial rounds of training, which are already in progress, will bring together managers, owners and bookkeepers from about 60 private clinics from Addis Ababa. The remaining 60 clinics in Oromiya and Amhara Regions will be trained before the end of October, 2008. The necessity for this training emerged as one of the results of a survey conducted by the USAID-funded Banking on Health (BoH) project in over 280 clinics and pharmacies operating in Ethiopia. A key finding from this assessment was that improvement of business and financial management skills of the private health providers is critical for improving the quality of service and successfully integrating and sustaining HIV/AIDS and TB prevention, care and treatment services in the private health sector.
The objectives of the Financial Management training are to enable private medical clinic owners to use financial information to make sound business decisions, operate on a sustainable and profitable scale, and improve their bankability. The target audience for the training consists of private clinic owners, managers and other staff who have business decision making authority. The Bookkeeping and Financial Reporting course is meant to enable participants to organize financial data into common financial statements that can be used for business decisions by clinic owners or managers. The target audience for this course consists of private clinic bookkeepers and accountants.
Initial feedback from these training activities indicates that participants find the course material highly relevant and useful, and are eager to put it into practice in the management of their clinics. The project plans to support follow-up discussion groups for the training participants after a period of practice in order to identify and resolve challenges faced by clinic owners and managers in adopting the improved financial management practices introduced during the training.
PSP-E is a five-year project, initiated in 2004, with the goal of “expanding knowledge and access to affordable, high quality private sector HIV/AIDS and TB services.” PSP-E is currently building the capacity of 160 private health clinics in three regions to provide quality TB and HIV services through partnerships with the public sector.
