Evaluating the Norway-India Partnership Initiative

We have been hired by Norad to undertake a rigorous evaluation and cost effectiveness study of the impacts of the Norway India Partnership Initiative (NIPI) Phase II.

NIPI is a catalytic programme that seeks to help the Government of India improve and scale up quality continuum of care interventions at community and facility level, in order to accelerate progress towards development goals concerning child and maternal health. The primary aim of the evaluation is to provide evidence about the relative cost effectiveness of different interventions at different scales, to help inform the Government of India as to whether they should be taken to scale.

The secondary aim is to generate meta-lessons on appropriate modalities of support for a large-scale government primary health programme which does not require outside financial support but rather catalytic technical support and externally provided expertise. This could be an important contribution to debates on the future of Western aid to India (and other countries) which are increasingly resource rich but still have major public policy challenges that Western donors can meaningfully contribute towards. The mixed-methods evaluation includes both a large-scale household, health worker, and facility survey, the collection of cost data for CEA, and various qualitative studies.

Read the baseline report at Norad.no.