This toolkit is designed to equip The Challenge Initiative's hub staff with the practical skills, routines, and tools needed to coach city leaders and program or departmental managers to sustain their family planning (FP) programs after graduation from TCI by:

• Institutionalizing FP within local systems, budgets, and planning cycles
• Building leadership and management capacity across political, technical, and operational levels
• Fostering ownership, coordination, and accountability
• Cultivating a growth mindset and enduring commitment to citizen health and development

Why Leadership, Management, & Coordination Matter

TCI’s experience across geographies shows that 50% of success in sustaining FP programs stems from strong leadership, effective management, and consistent coordination.

• Leadership engagement from day one is critical. When local government leaders are not engaged early and do not clearly understand their role in the platform, traction is difficult to achieve and sustainability is compromised. Strong leadership from the outset enables cities to move through phases of implementation and ultimately graduate with confidence.
• Leadership transitions are inevitable. In both active and graduated cities, when key leaders leave, momentum often stalls and teams must restart advocacy and support efforts from scratch. Without clear systems and continuity mechanisms, FP priorities risk being deprioritized or lost entirely.

Failures in local government leadership are rarely technical – they are adaptive challenges:

• Political resistance
• Competing priorities
• Staff turnover
• Weak accountability

Coaching must therefore focus on helping leaders navigate behavior change, motivation, and power dynamics, not just technical fixes.

What Makes a City Leader Effective

 

Note: These traits are embedded in the modules. For example:

• Systems Thinking → Module 2
• Data-Driven Decision-Making → Module 3
• Motivation & Adaptability → Module 4

Coach city leaders and their teams to:

• Lead with Purpose (Leadership coaching)
• Manage with Clarity (Management coaching)
• Execute with Excellence (Technical coordination)

Coaching Principles for TCI Staff

• Coach the system, not just the individual: Work with focal points, technical teams, and mid-level managers who often outlast political transitions.
• Understand and map health system actors and roles: Diagnose who influences FP outcomes and tailor coaching accordingly.
• Build a growth mindset anchored in public service: Encourage leaders to see challenges as opportunities for innovation, tied to responsive citizenship.
• Unpack the health agenda and opportunities for innovation: Link FP to maternal health, youth, gender, and education priorities.
• Model adaptive leadership: Demonstrate persistence, curiosity, and resilience.
• Use data as a mirror and lever for change: Show leaders how evidence builds credibility and drives decisions.
• Bring leaders to the frontlines: Facility and community visits build empathy and advocacy urgency.
• Foster peer-to-peer learning: Facilitate exchanges across high, mid, and lower levels of leadership—ranging from national ministries of health to regional, council, and facility-level actors. These horizontal and vertical learning opportunities accelerate replication, build confidence, and reinforce ownership by showcasing practical solutions from similar contexts. 

Resource: Use the Coaching Essentials mini course to guide coaching conversations and build confidence.