 So in this session, the learning objectives are to understand the role of the HIST groups in supporting implementations in countries, to understand the organizational structures of the HIST network and the relationship between the UIO, University of Oslo and the groups, and then also how to get support for country implementations. So we first start with a little bit of background and describe what the HIST groups are. So today there are 18 groups across Africa, Asia, Latin America and here at the University of Oslo. These are DHS2 expert groups that provide long term and locally adapted support to countries as well as collaborate globally on capacity building and innovation. Many of the HIST groups are led by former UIO PhD students and have strong linkages to local universities. You can read much more detail about the HIST network on our website, the link is here. And then on the right you can see all the HIST groups listed. So many people ask how DHS has scaled successfully in so many countries and here are four good reasons for that. And all of them would have been impossible to achieve without HIST groups based in the countries and the regions where DHS is being used. These guys in the photo are some of the many that have been part of this journey and are part of a big HIST family. Alouka in the red t-shirt has spent 20 years now on his life mission to support the national HMIS and DHS2 in Nigeria. So what are the four ingredients that make up the secret HIST sauce recipe? Number one is capacity building. Regional and in-country capacity building is the most important activity for HIST. Having strong regional and in-country capacity is critical to achieve sustainability. The second is to provide long-term support. HIST is not a project, it's a program. The HIST groups are long-term and trusted partners to the Ministry of Health. Number three, closeness to the field and the user is critical when designing systems. And it's through the HIST groups in countries working with the users over time that we achieve this with the DHS2 platform development and in adapting DHS2 at the country level. Number four, global sharing of local solutions. Perhaps what makes HIST different from most other organizations and initiatives in this space is the focus on sharing. We strive for complete openness, not only in the software, but in all our work and to learn from each other and thrive as a collaborative network. It has taken time to convince partners and investors that the HIST group approach is the right one. But it is now endorsed and funded by global partners like the Global Fund, GAVI, UNICEF, NORAD and CDC. And having all these partners aligned around the same approach also enables us to help coordinate and align investments at the country level. All the HIST groups in the network share a set of core values related to open source, local ownership, sustainability, integration and data use. And the fullest of this principle you can read on our website. And each HIST group sign an MOU where these values are listed and the idea to follow these principles. So let's look in a bit more detail on what the core activities of the HIST groups are. We can broadly categorize them in four categories, country support, regional capacity building, research activities and global product development. So in terms of country support, perhaps the most important activity of HIST groups is to strengthen the HIST capacity in the governments that use the HIST. Most typically that is the Ministry of Health, but also increasingly now the Ministry of Education. This is happening to the HIST trainings and guidance. HIST groups also provide expert level support on the HIST configuration and maintenance. They also offer guidance on overall health information system architecture and work on interoperability solutions between DHS-2 and other systems in the country. HIST also develop custom DHS-2 applications to adapt to specific country needs. They also engage in broader HIST strengthening activities, work on assessments and help governments plan and budget for HIST strengthening activities. Then in terms of regional capacity building, the most important activity is that they help to run the DHS-2 academy program in each region. That means organizing and facilitating regional training events for countries that are in the same region, either share the same geography or share the same language. HIST groups also work together with University of Oslo to co-develop the global curriculum for the DHS-2 academy program. In addition to these more fixed training events, HIST groups also work at the regional level with regional entities and networks such as the WHO regional offices in Afro and POW in Latin America. They also work with more political groups like the Western Africa Health Organization, part of ECOWAS and the Asian eHealth Information Network. In terms of research activities, the HIST groups collaborate with the HIST-PIO research team on action research related to specific DHS-2 implementations and pilot projects. That means engaging in the field, solving problems together with the countries and through that learn what works and take part in the HIST action research program. Research can also include more deep dives, for example, around understanding local data use. Recent initiative has been to establish districts of excellence in several countries where the HISTs work together with the local users at the district level to fine-tune the DHS, understand needs for data use and then tailor the DHS analytical tools to these processes. The research activity is also important when it comes to understanding new domains to solve new challenges, document requirements and then feed this into the global products such as software development, implementation guidance and training. HIST groups also take part in assessments and revelations with the regional or country implementations. There's a strong link between the HIST groups and local universities that can take shape of internship programs at the HIST group or HIST group staff teaching at the local universities. And many of the HIST group staff are either enrolled in the PhD program here at UIO or have formally taken their PhD degree here. You can read much more about the research program on our website. So I mentioned earlier how important it is to be close to the field and the user when designing systems and that HIST groups support the global DHS to product development in many aspects. They act as representatives of ministries of health in the DHS to software development process and then represent kind of the main source for requirements in our roadmap and prioritization process. HIST groups also play a crucial role in facilitating field testing and validation of new functionality with critical feedback loops back to the global teams such as the software developers. HIST groups also innovate and develop custom solutions together with the users to solve specific problems quickly. And when relevant, these local innovations are later fed into generic global products and made available to all countries. HIST groups also participate in global teams more directly helping us to develop implementation toolkits such as implementation guidance and the metadata packages. They also get involved in developing training materials to get with the global team and also engage on app development in collaboration with the global software developers. So finally, let's look at how the HIST network is organized. HIST is not a global corporate organization. It's a collaborative network of many independent organizations that share the same vision and values and form both formal and informal partnerships across the network. To simplify, we can say that HIST operates at three levels. At the local single country level, each country should have a HIST group either in the country or nearby in the region that can provide long term support in the local language and has a good understanding of the local context. Each has to support the countries as we have discussed is mainly provided by individual HIST groups at this level. Then at the regional multi-country level, although we encourage HIST collaboration across all the groups, there are good reasons to form regional collaborations in each of the regions. The coordinate capacity building and country support is recently established a new coordinating mechanism at the regional level to more effectively coordinate regional activities. And this was called the regional HIST pubs. We'll talk more about this later. At the global level, although as we have discussed most HIST groups actively participate in global and generic work, activities are mainly coordinated by the HIST centre at the University of Oslo. Most global investments to DHS2 and HIST network come through the UIO, and a substantial part of this is subcontracted to the HIST pubs and the groups to engage in the global network. At the HIST group level, we talked about HIST groups providing direct support to countries. The geographic area of responsibility varies a bit from HIST group to HIST group, but the kind of minimum is that they support the country where they are based. Then typically most of the groups also support nearby countries in the region. A region can be geographic, neighbouring countries, but could also be according to language. For example, we have one HIST group based in Mozambique, supporting Portuguese-speaking countries, the Lusophone Africa, and these are spread geographically across Africa. And then we have other groups supporting Spanish-speaking countries. Other countries outside of the immediate region are sometimes also supported if the HIST groups have some specialised expertise. For example, in the new domain of education, there are certain groups that have done this in-country and are now supporting other countries outside the region as they have gained the special expertise. Ideally, each country using DHS2 should have one HIST group that is nearby. We are, of course, continuously strengthening the network of HIST groups and try to respond to new demand. There are new regions emerging with DHS demands and we are trying to actively set up new HIST groups or find other support options for these regions. And that includes Latin America and the Caribbean, the MENA MRA region, and Eastern Europe, Central Asia. We recommend that countries and organisations contact HIST groups directly for support for implementations in a single country. And you can find the listing of all the groups on our website. Then at the regional level, we talked about the HIST pubs as a coordinating body representing all HIST groups in the region to better coordinate regional DHS2 activities. We have so far established the different HIST pubs, one to support the southern eastern Africa region and this is hosted by HIST Buganda. And then we have another one in western central Africa hosted by HIST WCA based in Togo and then a third hub for HIST Asia hosted by HIST India. The HIST pubs are hosted by mature HIST groups with strong organisational and financial capacity in order to take on multi-country grounds from global investors and organisations. Some key responsibilities for the HIST pubs include organising and coordinating regional capacity building as the DHS2 Academy programme, also coordinate support to countries across the region, and they foster experience sharing and skill development between HIST groups in the same region. More formally, the HIST pubs also manage regional country support grants from the Global Fund. And to contact the HIST pub for multi-country support, you can email the HIST group responsible for hosting that specific hub. Those were listed on the previous slide. Then at the global level, you have the HIST Centre at the University of Oslo leading global platform development, leading the work of developing generic implementation toolkits and guidance, as well as training materials. The HIST Centre also facilitates collaboration and sharing in the HIST network, and we coordinate global and multi-country work in collaboration with the HIST pubs. We also coordinate HIST research activities and run a PhD programme and master programmes, both here at the University of Oslo and in collaboration with other universities across the world. You can contact the HIST Centre if you have a global project enquiries at post at DHS2.org. The reason COVID pandemic is a great example of the HIST work in action and shows how critical it is to have existing systems and capacity in place when new solutions are needed quickly. The map here, you can see all the countries that adopted the HIST platform for COVID-19 surveillance. 47 in total and another 42 for the COVID vaccine delivery. So this started with local innovation by HIST groups at the country level. HIST groups rapidly responded to the pandemic with local customisations of the DHS2 platform in collaboration with country governments. This started as early as January 2020 in Sri Lanka. Then these local innovations from the first countries were shared to other HIST groups and the global teams through webinars, slack channel discussions and informal communication. Then the UIO global teams learned from these early countries and expanded the WHO DHS2 surveillance and immunisation toolkits to also support COVID-19 requirements. The toolkits contain standard metadata that can be installed in the national DHS2 instance, system design guides, installation guides and end user training material and training databases. This then enabled many countries to take advantage of these early innovations. Then HIST groups were trained on the new solutions and the new toolkits and also set up processes to share experiences across the groups and had set up rapid communication back to the global teams to improve global solutions. There were a lot of rapid cycles of improvements coming in with feedback from countries through the HIST groups up to the global teams that worked on the toolkits and the software improvement. Then in each country, HIST groups supported capacity building of national core teams to implement the toolkits and customise according to local context. This was provided by HIST groups through either onsite or virtual trainings and guidance and sometimes global team also supported with technical backstopping. Then within the country at sub-national and local level, the DHS2 was further customised and configured to support local workflows of service delivery providers and data managers on the front line. This was cascaded and decentralised in terms of data collection and analysis to sub-national levels for local action. To summarise, the HIST network provides DHS2 expertise to support sustainable information systems. The HIST network is united by common values and supported by global partners. HIST groups offer local, country-focused support and are long-term minister of health partners. HIST pubs coordinate regional support and capacity building and at the HIST centre at the University of Oslo, we coordinate the HIST network and lead multi-regional and global projects.