The Maternal, Newborn and Child Health Programme (MNCH2) goals are designed to provide consistent, high quality care for women and children from pregnancy through to the child’s fifth birthday. It focuses on six states (Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Yobe and Zamfara) because, at the start of the programme, these were suffering the highest number of maternal and child deaths from avoidable causes.

It’s a project with many strands and a consortium was created to deliver it – each consortium partner is responsible for one or more technical areas. We were appointed for our strategic planning expertise and our role involves working with national, state and local government health organisations to help them improve the efficiency of external aid and develop their own capacity to plan and budget effectively for health programmes. We have developed a user-friendly organisational capacity assessment tool (OCAT) based on the World Health Organisation (WHO) health system domains.  The OCAT provides an objective and measurable way for the health organisations to identify strengths and weaknesses and provides learning exercises to increase the capacity of managers and technical leads. We’ve designed the OCAT to be simple, with critical domains weighted using a highly visual traffic light dashboard display that shows performance and progress.

We have strategic planning coordinators in each state and we run consultations, workshops and planning sessions to provide ongoing support and ensure that plans for health programmes are fit for purpose, robust and supported by adequate resources.