Background
The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH) is an alliance of 1,400 member organizations, across 10 different constituencies in 192 countries and is the only global health partnership focusing specifically on women’s, children’s, and adolescents’ health (WCAH) and well-being.
PMNCH provides a multi-stakeholder platform for organizations to align objectives, strategies, and resources, and agree on interventions to improve sexual, reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health (SRMNCAH) and well-being to ensure that women, children, and adolescents remain at the center of the global and national development agenda.
PMNCH’s Strategy for 2021-2025, focuses on three thematic priorities:
- Preventable Maternal and Child Mortality, including Newborn deaths and stillbirths;
- Sexual and Reproductive Health & Rights (SRHR);
- Adolescent Well-being.
PMNCH as an advocacy platform mobilizes, aligns, and amplifies the voices of its partners to influence the development of equitable and better policies, enhanced financing, and better interventions for women, children, and adolescents. It operates on the premise that partners are able to achieve more when working together than what they are able to influence alone. PMNCH achieves this through facilitation and coordination with partners’ programmes of work, using the latest digital technologies.
The PMNCH Campaigns and Partner Engagement Teams coordinate and lead global, regional, and national partner engagement efforts, advocacy campaigns, events, and media efforts to mobilize and follow up on commitments to improve policies and increase financing and services for women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health and well-being.
This collaboration provides technical support for such advocacy campaigns and accountability efforts with concurrent support for the production of knowledge synthesis and translation products to ensure that campaign and advocacy messages are evidence-based to deliver on PMNCH strategic priorities. Knowledge-related work will be produced in close collaboration with members of PMNCH’s Knowledge Synthesis team of the PMNCH Secretariat.
PMNCH advocacy and accountability efforts seek to provide evidence and strengthen the capacity of partners to recognize and act upon important policy, financing, and service delivery gaps and ensure respective commitments are in place and being implemented.
To strengthen this work, PMNCH will support the development of a Digital Commitment Compendium that hosts:
- Improved evidence: Accessible to all PMNCH partners, the Digital Commitment Compendium will identify existing commitments, i.e. pledges, in priority countries and policy gaps at the country level as well as across global and regional initiative levels, in a simplified and user-friendly format. The commitment compendium is an online living database that aims to track existing commitments, namely national policies, strategies and plans for women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health being adopted and implemented in priority countries and can be used to inform advocacy efforts for the mobilization of new commitments. While commitments can vary in their nature and contents from country to country, they should adhere to quality standards that match as many of the following criteria:
- Scope:
- Government-led financial, policy and/or service delivery domestic pledge to advance WCAH through MNCH, SRHR and/or AHWB. Commitments may be supported by Official Development Assistance (ODA) for health;
- Commitments are made in support of national campaign targets and global, regional policy processes and platforms generated by Member State-led institutions or initiatives in support of these processes;
- A specific focus on WCAH and a subsequent link to the national social development plans, policies, and budgets.
Context and format:
- Context-specific, highlighting concrete and measurable results that can be monitored through established institutionalized accountability mechanisms;
- SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound;
- ‘New’ or ‘Additional’ commitments where possible;
3. Commitments will be mapped across three main themes (MNCH, SRHR, AHWB) along with their respective subdomains. For example:
- MNCH theme: Intersectoral approaches for MNCH across the life-course, including nutrition, WASH, environment and gender equality
- Subdomain: Maternal, childhood and adolescent nutrition (nutrition across the life course) including stunting among children under 5 years and anaemia
The compendium essentially includes information about existing:
- WCAH commitments pledged through regional or global processes
- Recommended indicators to measure progress of these commitments
- Existing accountability mechanisms to monitor, review progress and make decisions for action/remedies.
4. Coordinated analysis and mobilization: In 10 selected countries, PMNCH partners, coordinated by a lead country partner, will use the Compendium as a tool to understand the breadth of pledges made by governments towards national WCAH priorities, and thereafter locate gaps in commitment-making and identify priorities for implementation, working through existing multi-stakeholder platforms as well as PMNCH national and global Digital Advocacy Hubs;
5. Visibility and accountability for commitments: Through this work, PMNCH partners will amplify the status of existing commitments and drive accountability through existing national, regional and global institutions (AU, UN, G7, national parliaments, etc.)
For advanced coordinated analysis and mobilization, PMNCH will support a partner-led analysis of a sub-set of existing national WCAH commitments in each of the 10 priority countries (Bangladesh, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia) to assess existence and quality of commitments, the status of implementation and, in this process, highlight any gaps to be addressed. The individual country mapping and analysis will inform the development of joint advocacy action plans that will rally partners to deepen their joint advocacy and accountability efforts in these areas. These efforts will employ PMNCH partner resources and tools such as country profiles, dashboards, policy compendiums, legislation databases, and commitment documentation. To accelerate progress towards improved accountability for WCAH outcomes, PMNCH will identify and support lead in-country partners willing to take on a coordination role in national-level partner-led activities.
PMNCH will continue to encourage all stakeholders, including private sector, civil society, donors/foundations, academia, communities, and others- to develop plans and support accelerated implementation and follow-up efforts of government-led commitments. For further details, please see the PMNCH revised approach for advocacy and accountability for commitments to women’s, children’s and adolescents' health.
Purpose of the collaboration
University of Oslo (UiO) students to work collaboratively with the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health (PMNCH) Secretariat to support and strengthen knowledge and partner capacity to advocate and engage in accountability mechanisms to advance progress on WCAH within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The collaboration activities will include background research, liaison with 30 PMNCH focus countries, analysis and mapping exercises related to a sub-set of country commitments in the remit of women’s, children’s, and adolescents’ health.
Deliverables
The deliverables will be completed in a phased approach. The cohorts will be established based on student enrollment during the academic year and its correspondence with the collaboration timeline. The students in each cohort are expected to produce the following deliverables:
In support of the implementation of PMNCH’s revised approach to advocacy and accountability for WCAH commitments, and under guidance of PMNCH focal points, UiO students to:
Cohort 1 - August 2023 to December 2023
- Contribute to the development of the digital commitment compendium and support efforts to collate WCAH policy, financing and service delivery pledge documentation made by governments by:
- Assisting with desk review and mapping of initiatives and global and/or regional policy processes and platforms to be included in the digital commitment compendium. Support would include conducting searches, mapping and analysis as follows:
- Visit the websites or official platforms of each global initiative identified by PMNCH and spelt out in available operational documents, including dedicated spreadsheets.
- Look for sections dedicated to commitments, goals, targets, or objectives.
- Explore reports, progress updates, or annual publications that provide details on indicators, metrics, or measurements used to track progress towards the commitments.
- Extract relevant indicators or metrics associated with each commitment. These may be explicitly mentioned or implied in the documents reviewed.
- Populate the matrix/spreadsheet by mapping the commitments and indicators of each initiative to the relevant subtopics and thematic areas identified by PMNCH.
- Note down any additional contextual information, such as target dates, specific actions, or implementation strategies, that may enhance the understanding of each commitment-subtopic mapping.
By following this methodology, interns can effectively explore global initiatives' websites, identify commitments and indicators, and link them to specific subtopics or thematic areas of interest. This mapping will provide valuable insights for research, decision-making, or organizational planning purposes for country partners.
Support would include conducting searches, cataloguing, and preparing brief synthesis on lessons learned where requested.
Cohort 2 – January 2024 to June 2024
- Support the development of the analytical framework that helps country lead partners in PMNCH priority countries to analyse the quality of the commitment against the set attributes and progress made by national governments towards actualizing their commitments, policies, financial allocations, and service delivery packages pertinent to WCAH for such commitments;
- For identified countries, support the commitment analysis coordinated by the country lead partners as requested and appropriate by web-search, deck review and analysis, and synthesis.
In the execution of these deliverables, the UiO students will liaise closely with designated focal points from PMNCH.
PMNCH’s role PMNCH will provide the following support
- An introductory briefing on the commitment approach and the work to date
- Meetings at regular intervals with students to assess progress and provide guidance
- A technical focal point assigned to each student
- Field assessment following an agreed template developed by UiO
- Potentially, providing the opportunity to attend key global health events or meetings such as the World Health Assembly
- Potentially, and at the direction of country partners, providing the opportunity to conduct country visits in support of multistakeholder platform discussions
Location
Offsite - Home based.