Throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America public health professionals and paraprofessionals work to control serious, frequent and preventable causes of death and sickness among women and children. Despite international agreement about which health programs to implement and huge investments to support them, avoidable deaths remain high. One reason is the inadequate quality with which programs are implemented.

"Assessing Child Survival Programs in Developing Countries" provides local health system managers with basic principles for rapid precise program monitoring and evaluation in difficult tropical conditions. Joseph Valadez explains how to adapt Lot Quality Assurance Sampling (LQAS) as used in industrial quality control more than half a century ago, to assess health program coverage and technical quality of service providers. He shows that by examining no more than 19 children from a health facility catchment area a manager can judge whether coverage with child survival interventions has reached a minimal level, and how to observe health workers perform a task 6 times to judge their technical competency.

Joseph Valadez demonstrates that quick assessment is not necessarily dirty, and can provide the information needed to enhance child survival throughout the developing world. In that spirit "Assessing Child Survival Programs in Developing Countries" is a path breaking text book of modern health services research that both practitioners and students will find indispensable and understandable.

Project sustainability has received considerable attention in recent years. The increased awareness stems from a growing concern with social development issues such as poverty reduction, project sustainability, the equal participation of women, and the social costs of economic development. This handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the wide range of techniques available for monitoring and evaluating the main kinds of social development programs. The authors highlight or review a number of topics that have been overlooked in earlier evaluation publications, such as: -The organization of monitoring and evaluation at the project, sectoral, and national levels -The management of the databases required to elect, design, and implement new social projects and programs -The monitoring and evaluation of project sustainability -Simple and cost-effective methods of estimating project impact. The authors also discuss methods for identifying potential beneficiaries and their information needs and ways of managing evaluations.