Social mobilization activities with women in the Yankwashi LGA in Jigawa State, Nigeria’s RSI site.
In 2023, The Challenge Initiative (TCI) introduced the Rapid Scale Initiative (RSI), a new model for scaling up high-impact family planning practices and other interventions (HIPs & HIIs) that can achieve results in a shorter time frame of two years. Typically TCI engages with a city for about three years, before they graduate from TCI’s direct support.
Supported by Bayer AG, RSI focuses on TCI’s key performance indicators (KPIs) of additional users and local government self-reliance in implementing HIPs & HIIs for sustainable family planning and adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health (AYSRH) programs. TCI and Bayer assessed a selection of proposals to decide which locations offer the best promise of achieving the KPIs.
TCI launched RSI in 10 cities in 2023, including four cities in India (Bhubaneshwar in Odisha and Satna, Morena and Ratlam in Madhya Pradesh), one state in Nigeria (Jigawa), three cities in East Africa (Hoima, Uganda; Homabay, Kenya; Geita DC, Tanzania), and two cities in Pakistan (Multan and Khanewal). Of the nearly 992,000 additional family planning clients TCI contributed to in 2023, 33,307 came from these 10 cities.
In India’s four RSI cities, TCI expedited intrauterine device (IUCD) training and implemented fixed-day static services while also contributing to Madhya Pradesh’s Program Implementation Plan. East Africa’s RSI cities focused on advocacy for funding family planning activities in the upcoming financial year and coaching on HIPs & HIIs. In Pakistan, TCI collaborated with local family planning leaders in its two RSI cities to conduct gap analyses, initiate RAISE assessments, prioritize HIPs & HIIs, and develop master coaches. In Nigeria, Jigawa State’s program design was approved in Novemebr 2023.
RSI stemmed from an idea proposed by TCI’s East Africa hub to distill the most essential components of the TCI model to stimulate rapid diffusion in targeted cities. Under RSI, TCI focuses on strengthening local capacity to implement a few main HIPs & HIIs at an accelerated pace. Other TCI elements –capacity transfer, political support from local governments, tailored program design, and data collection – are maintained to facilitate self-reliance.
Insights gained from RSI will inform ongoing efforts to refine TCI’s operational model.
