2022 Annual Survey Showcases TCI-U’s Continued Effectiveness and Increasing Coverage

The Challenge Initiative (TCI) enables local governments to scale up high-impact family planning and adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health (AYSRH) interventions to improve family planning access and uptake among women and girls in poor urban areas.

Its key mechanism for scale is TCI University (TCI-U) – an online capacity-strengthening tool that helps TCI coaches facilitate the transfer of critical knowledge and skills to local government decision-makers and implementers, as well as learning and collaboration across all 12 countries in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

To ensure that TCI-U continues to meet the needs of its audiences, Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs (CCP), which leads the TCI’s knowledge management (KM) portfolio, conducts an annual online survey to solicit feedback from TCI-U registered users. The survey examines the reach, usability, usefulness and use of TCI-U resources, uncovers additional insights about TCI’s coaching activities and collects suggestions for improvements.

This year’s fifth annual survey – available in English, French and Hindi – collected 1,036 responses, marking a 7% increase from the last year. As illustrated in the infographic below, the overall trends remained the same as previous years, with key findings confirming that TCI-U’s effects on user knowledge, mindset and practice continued to be extremely positive. From those that responded, 92% found TCI-U covered topics relevant to their work, 90% said they found the content trustworthy and credible, and 89% said they were able to find the information they needed.

Notably, this year’s survey successfully captured more perspectives from those who requested and received coaching support, often referred to as “coachees.” Previous assessments collected more responses from TCI-trained coaches; however, this year, more coachees responded to the online survey. Coaching and technical assistance sessions appear to be taking place more regularly on the ground, e.g., each trained coach having an increased number of coachees, which reflects efforts across hubs to more intentionally plan and schedule coaching sessions.

For example, many more respondents explicitly stated that TCI-U resources increased their knowledge and skills related to specific family planning and AYSRH interventions and improved their confidence and ability to coach others. Those who received coaching or technical assistance support agreed that their interactions with their coaches helped them perform their job, particularly in program implementation, data use, advocacy and coordination.

According to the survey findings, TCI-U users are highly interested in seeing the continued expansion and enhancement of TCI-U’s collection of online tools and resources as well as approaches to engage and connect users for coaching, mentoring and peer learning. With such encouraging feedback, TCI will continue striving for excellence in 2023 by engaging with TCI-U users to make enhancements that address their unique learning needs.

Explore the survey findings in the following infographic: