Episode 21 · Mozambique
Evaluation level up: Measuring what matters
Dr Shay Soremekun · Epidemiologist and Co-deputy Director, Centre for Evaluation, LSHTM
Nov 2025
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About this episode
Everyone's talking about LLM evals and benchmarking. But ultimately people care about impact - and impact is rarely a neat linear path to a yes/no answer. Dr Shay Soremekun of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine shares what it took to evaluate a digital health tool for community health workers in Mozambique and Uganda: program theory, logic models, process evaluation, and an unexpected finding that changed everything.
“To understand why it improved care, if it did, was as important, if not more important, than understanding that it did.”
Dr Shay Soremekun
What we cover
- 01Program theory and logic models: connecting intervention to intermediate steps to outcomes - not just the final number
- 02The inSCALE study: evaluating a digital decision support tool for CHWs treating malaria, diarrhoea, and pneumonia in children under five
- 03The unexpected finding: facility staff, not community health workers, were the main driver of improved outcomes
- 04Why understanding how it works is as important as knowing that it works - for adaptation and scale
- 05Formative research and co-creation: how to generate hypotheses on what to measure
- 06Iterating during implementation: network outages, older CHWs, changing app partners mid-study
- 07The community health worker who started a solar phone-charging business with the trial equipment
- 08Decolonising evaluation: indigenous methods, co-production, and ceding control to people on the ground
- 09Quick-fire: how digital health companies should approach evidence generation and outcome selection
About the guest
Dr Shay Soremekun
Epidemiologist and Co-deputy Director, Centre for Evaluation, LSHTM
Dr Shay Soremekun is an epidemiologist and Co-deputy Director of the Centre for Evaluation at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her research focuses on child and adolescent health in low and middle income settings, including trials of low-cost digital disease prevention programmes. She is a member of the UK Government Evaluation and Trial Advice Panel (ETAP) and sits on the steering committee for the John Snow Society. She lectures at postgraduate level on evaluation, epidemiology, and public health, and leads an MSc module in Study Design.
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Transcript
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