New PASS Bulletin: City-Led Health Programming Begins with Financial Commitment

The Challenge Initiative has launched the third edition of its learning series, Pathways to Scale and Sustainability or PASS, to chronicle lessons learned as local governments implement TCI’s proven interventions with the aim of taking them to scale. This edition, City-Led Health Programming Begins With Financial Commitment, focuses on the foundational principle of TCI’s scale and sustainability approach – that is, implementing demand-driven programs by engaging with cities that opt in, commit their own political and financial resources, and select and implement interventions. Specifically, it showcases strategies that TCI’s regional hubs in East Africa, Francophone West Africa, India and Nigeria have employed to garner local government leadership, advocate for the commitment of financial resources to family planning programs and operationalize release of those committed funds.

The issue showcases how India adapted TCI’s standard self-selection process to better align with the annual national planning and budgeting processes of the National Health Mission and was able to include TCI proven interventions within government budgets, East Africa’s engagement with local geographies in the direct sub-awards based upon workplans that highlight both what activities the funds from the geography will be spent and what TCI funds will be spent on, Francophone West Africa’s work with local governments to establish commercial banks accounts where both TCI and the geographies’ funding both reside and finally the various resource mobilization strategies that Nigeria uses to ensure states’ political and financial commitment, including its innovative performance-based tracker.

TCI’s PASS Learning Series will be published periodically as TCI works to rapidly scale up and sustain proven reproductive health solutions for under-served urban poor communities, learns from implementation, and uses that knowledge to evolve its model and ensure success. Select content from this series will be written up in more detail for consideration in peer-reviewed journals.

To receive updates on the PASS series and notification about the next brief, sign up for our Business Unusual newsletter. Below is an online version of PASS or you can download or print a PDF.