This article is the first in a new series called “MLE Tools” that explores TCI’s innovative monitoring tools.
The Challenge Initiative (TCI) empowers local governments across 213 cities in 13 countries to scale up high-impact family planning practices and interventions in underserved urban communities. Launched in 2016, TCI builds on the success of the Urban Reproductive Health Initiative, focusing on locally driven efforts. By integrating global high-impact practices and locally tailored interventions, TCI ensures that cities can sustainably address the family planning needs of their populations.
Monitoring is a crucial part of this platform, enabling TCI to gauge progress toward intended outcomes and overall impact. This is due to the diverse stakeholders across multiple locations with different capabilities and needs. Also, collecting and managing the large volume of data from these cities while ensuring data quality can be challenging without the right tools and framework.
TCI’s Monitoring, Learning, and Evaluation (MLE) system has evolved over time, incorporating insights from an external program review led by Mathematica in its first phase, an independent evaluation led by Itad in its current phase, as well as from TCI’s own experiences from scaling interventions. To overcome challenges in monitoring on a global scale, TCI refined and developed new tools to track outcomes effectively across partner cities. These improvements include refining the algorithm applied to health management information systems (HMIS) data to calculate net contraceptive uptake, creating tools to better track scale-up of high-impact interventions/practices (HII/HIP)¹ and health systems strengthening (HSS), and crafting a self-reliance scorecard to predict the sustainability of interventions beyond active engagement with TCI.
TCI’s Theory of Change and results framework are designed around several intermediate outcomes leading to two primary outcomes: increased voluntary contraceptive uptake and greater local government self-reliance in implementing high-impact family planning practices (see small green boxes in Figure 1). These outcomes contribute to TCI’s goal of improving reproductive health and ensuring sustainable family planning solutions at scale (see large green box in Figure 1).
Figure 1: TCI’s Theory of Change
TCI’s tools were designed to align with and measure these intermediate outcomes (IO) and primary outcomes (PO). See Figure 2 below. Refined and new tools were deployed beginning October 2023 using a staggered approach to ensure effective tracking and sustainable impact at scale.
Figure 2: TCI’s Result Framework
Table 1 below summarizes TCI’s tools.
Table 1: TCI Tools
¹TCI is a platform for scaling global high-impact practices (HIPs) as well as other promising interventions. HIPs are evidence-based best practices reflecting global expert consensus on what works in FP programming. TCI operationalizes and adapts them for the local context before being adopted as a TCI platform offering. Other high-impact interventions in TCI’s toolkit are proven approaches that are unique to the country where they are being implemented.
