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Article History

Received: 3 May 2018

Accepted: 20 September 2018

First Online: 27 September 2018

Author’s information

: MQ (MSPH) is a research coordinator with Innovations for Poverty Action, Tanzania, and comes from a health systems and systems engineering background. Her interests lie in the realm of health systems strengthening, the translation of policy into practice, and the intersection of health systems in crisis affected settings.NJ (MSPH, DrPH) is faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, USA and at the Centre for Evidence Based Health Care at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Her focus is on the nexus between health policy and systems research; innovations in evidence-informed policy and practice; and the relationship between academia and public policy. She is currently the Vice-Chair of The Translating Evidence to Action Thematic Working Group for Health Systems Global, and Senior Technical Advisor to PMA2020 at the Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health.SB (MPhil, PhD) is a Professor in the International Health Department of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Sara is broadly interested in health systems in low and middle-income countries having studied issues in health financing, health markets, health worker motivation, and effects of development assistance on health systems. She is particularly interested in capacity development, health systems governance, and the use of evidence in policy and decision-making. She has played a significant role in the development of the field of Health Policy and Systems Research being formerly Chair of Health Systems Global, editor of Health Policy and Planning, and Executive Director of the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research.

: This study was exempted from ethics approval by the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health Institutional Review Board (IRB) (#00007484), as the nature of the data being collected was not considered to be private or personal. The study team obtained oral consent from all participants prior to any interviews or focus group discussions to maintain best practices for data collection.

: N/A

: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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