Once stakeholders’ interests and their roles in the program design and data management processes are analyzed, developing the data management plan, also known as the monitoring and evaluation plan, comes next.

The data management plan should show the expected results in relation to its goals and objectives, describes the data needed, how data will be collected and analyzed, how this information will be used, the resources that will be needed in data collection, analysis, and when data will be reported or feedback to stakeholders.

Refer to Leadership approaches on how to link data management with leadership approaches.

Part of data management planning is understanding the data. Often data exists and is available. Tools used in TCI contain relevant data used in all phases of program design, monitoring, and evaluation. In reviewing the existing data, consider: What does the existing data tell us?

• Are young people’s voices in the existing data? If not, how can we capture them?
• Which sub-groups of young people are “invisible” in the existing data sets?
• Does the data available speak to the realization of young people’s sexual and reproductive rights, including informed consent and aligned to existing data privacy policies?

Expression of Interest

Local stakeholders should review and use existing data in submitting their Expression of Interest (EOI) and to inform their Program Design, which lays the groundwork for understanding the landscape and existing gaps that the local government unit (LGU) hopes to address.

RAISE tool

Many LGUs will find it useful to use TCI’s Reflection and Action to Improve Self-reliance and Effectiveness (RAISE) tool as part of the program design stage and landscaping. This will allow the LGU and TCI Program Implementation Team (PIT) to assess the completeness, timeliness, and accuracy of the FHSIS as a primary data source for monitoring and evaluating TCI programming; see domain 2.4-2.6 (Pages 14-17) of the RAISE tool.

Data Profiling Information

Certain national policies require regular profiling of adolescents and youth in the community, to include community registration, individual youth profiling, and even health facility client lists. Check with the LGU or the health facility if access to information is allowed and can be used for program design and development. As there may be existing national policies on data use and data privacy, double check how access to such information may require informed consent from actual individuals, or other permissions to ensure ethical use of data. Please note that for approaches to service delivery, voluntarism and informed choice for family planning has to be observed and respected, thus, deliberate targeting of individuals for particular methods is not allowed and recommended. Refer to approaches on Adolescent and Youth-Friendly Health Services (AYFHS) and ISDN.

Systems Roadmap

Systems roadmap is a management and monitoring tool to aid LGUs in the analysis of system gaps and increased accountability towards achievement of outcomes as opposed to mere activity implementation. The roadmap details system level indicators to achieve or maintain adolescent and youth friendly cities. The technical roadmap is used during leadership and technical sessions to surface adaptive and technical issues of local governments in ASRH. See the Leadership approaches.

Data Gathering through FGDs and KIIs

And, when interested and needed, conducting a few focus group discussions (FGDs) and key informant interviews (KIIs) with adolescents (in-school youth, out-of-school youth, etc.), significant adults, local health facility staff, etc. This may include:

• Parents
• Teachers
• Service providers
• Barangay officials
• Youth organizations
• Local Chief Executive/councilor for health
• Chief Health Officer
• Adolescent coordinators from health centers/facilities
• SK/LYDO officers
• Representatives from the church/media and other partner agencies

Assessing the state of family planning and AYSRH in a specific LGU requires not only baseline data but also knowledge of what data are available and how often. The Demographic Landscape Table, which is part of the landscaping analysis of the program design, helps to focus on key background indicators. These indicators may be useful in informing your AYSRH program can be found from:

• Service statistics from the Field Health Services Information System (FHSIS)
• High school attendance and dropouts (Division of Schools)
• Hospital delivery (City health office)
• Natality statistics (Local civil registrar)
• Existing survey data

In addition, you may want to consider reviewing recent qualitative studies, such as:

• USAID’s ReachHealth Project’s human-centered design activity with teens
• Breakthrough RESEARCH and De La Salle University’s Improving reproductive health and family planning outcomes among out-of-school adolescents and youth in the Philippines

Determine the indicators that need to be captured along with their data source and frequency. Note that the LGU might identify more indicators of particular interest in their locality. Based on the TCI proven interventions in the Philippines toolkit, these key performance indicators include:

Means of measuring data and targets are set in the at the national level. In the Philippines, relevant sources are the RPRH Law M&E Framework, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) databases, Department of Health’s National Objectives for Health (NOH), POPCOM’s Philippine Population Management Program (PPMP), POPCOM’s Basic Demographics Booklet, as well as the national surveys such as the National Demographic Health Survey (NDHS) or the Young Adult Fertility Survey (YAFS).

All staff implementing TCI interventions should be oriented on all the data forms, definitions of key indicators and basic analysis of the data and indicators. Regular coaching should be given to all those who handle the data.

For those not directly handling the data, they should receive coaching on the importance of age-disaggregated data and encouraged to regularly review the data in an effort to promote a culture of data for decision-making for AYSRH programming. 

As TCI activities are implemented, a range of stakeholders, including service providers, data managers and TCI data managers, collect relevant data to track project implementation, service statistics, commodity supplies and broader health outcomes. Ensuring these data are of high quality is critical to making good decisions about resource allocation, planning and programming.

To ensure data is complete and accurate, TCI staff and partners implement routine data quality checks. For example, conducting data quality checks of routine service statistics and comparing them to project record data: if the trends in the two data sources are similar, then this validates the accuracy of the routine data. If the trends are not similar, then it can point to quality issues with the routine data, which can prompt us further to identify and address the problems. 

Having a reporting schedule indicating the frequency of reporting, purpose of reporting, target audience, format and outlet of reporting, person responsible for report preparation and feed backing is important to determine the information needs of the stakeholders, possible costs in the data collection, type of data and the analysis needed, and the format of reporting (e.g., report dissemination through social media, TV and radio interviews, town hall meetings, community forums).

Routine feedback meetings provide a useful opportunity to share findings in a variety of ways for a variety of objectives. One objective that is important to scaling up TCI evidence-based approaches is advocacy for ASRH and family planning at provincial and national levels. A helpful method for sharing data to a wide variety of audiences is through data visualizations since people can process and understand information faster and better when presented visually than through text-based reports.

During these meetings, LGU/barangay and PIT members should review the data with TCI to:

• Identify potential programmatic shifts
• Assess and address data quality concerns
• Identify new capacity building opportunities to support or enhance data comprehension and analysis skills as well as foster a data use for decision-making culture among all TCI stakeholders

During these data review meetings, it is useful to communicate gaps in the data in a constructive manner, appreciating and acknowledging each person right in the beginning, followed by suggested improvements (offering additional coaching support or suggesting peer coaching, whatever may be required) instead of direct blaming. This approach boosts morale and provides directions for course correction. Refer to AYFHS, Youth Engagement, Parent Engagement approaches.