Third Party Monitoring (TPM) for Women’s Integrated Sexual Health (WISH)
Verifying results and informing programme improvements for FCDO's primary sexual and reproductive health programme.
Project team members
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DateAugust 2018 - October 2021
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Areas of expertiseHealth , Research and Evidence (R&E)
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Client
UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO)
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KeywordsData collection , Impact evaluation , Quantitative methods , Research uptake , Value for Money (VFM) , Health financing (HF) , Health monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning (Heath MERL) , Community health workers (CHWs) , Family Planning and Sexual and Reproductive Health (FP and SRP) , Maternal Newborn, and Child Health (MNCH) , Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) , Quantitative impact evaluations (QIE) , Quasi-experimental , Randomised Control Trials (RCTs)
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PartnersItad , Forcier Consulting , AEDES , ATR Consulting
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Project number
A2119
The Women’s Integrated Sexual Health (WISH) programme is FCDO’s flagship sexual and reproductive health (SRH) programme. This £238 million programme, operating in 27 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia over a period of three years, will deliver up to 20% of the UK’s overall commitment to improving global sexual and reproductive health and rights by ensuring equitable access to family planning, and sexual and reproductive health services to women and girls across the global, particularly the vulnerable and marginalised populations.
We, in partnership with Itad, conduct monitoring of WISH results and support for evidence and learnings to provide FCDO with updates on programme impact and to inform programme adaptation to maximise performance.
The challenge
As of 2019, 218 million women of reproductive age in low- and middle-income countries have an unmet need for family planning—that is, they want to avoid pregnancy but are not using a modern contraceptive method. Unmet need is higher for vulnerable and marginalised populations, such as those living in poverty, those living with a disability and young people. With a focus on underserved populations, the WISH programme aims to improve access to and use of family planning (FP) and sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services by:
- Increasing demand and uptake for FP by improving knowledge and community support;
- Improving access to quality, voluntary FP and other SRH services;
- Promoting an enabling legal, financial and policy environment for sustainable FP and other SRH services; and
- Sharing globally evidence-based innovations and practices to increase women’s choice and access to SRH services.
As part of the WISH consortium, FCDO contracted a TPM to verify results and inform programme improvements.
Our approach
We take a three-pronged approach to assess programme impact and inform programme adaptation:
- verification and triangulation of results reported by the WISH implementing partners;
- generation of evidence of results through discrete studies; and
- facilitation of learning among the implementing partners and FCDO to analyse progress, discuss course correction, identify good practice, and adapt programme implementation as needed, and to spread evidence of best practice.
Outcomes and wider impacts
This work supports our overall objective of providing an ongoing critical constructive review of the implementers and recommend improvements for course correcting and improving the overall delivery of WISH.
Our verification work is providing FCDO with a critical eye on implementers’ data and data systems, thus giving confidence in the results reported. In addition, we are enhancing programme learning by generating new evidence on programme interventions, facilitating greater collaboration across implementers, and helping implementers to strengthen the systems that generate routine programme data and support evidence-based decision-making.