Evaluation of the Norway India Partnership Initiative for Maternal and Child Health

The Norway India Partnership Initiative (NIPI) was established in 2006 through a joint statement by the Prime Ministers of Norway and India. The vision of NIPI is to provide strategic, catalytic and innovative support to the Indian health care system for improved maternal and child health. The initiative is one out of five bilateral partnerships that Norway has entered into to support the achievement of the health related Millennium Development Goals.

The aim of the evaluation was to take stock of the initiative as it enters its second phase and assess the extent to which the program initiative has met its stated goals and determine its future viability. The evaluation team was asked to describe and analyse the governance structure of NIPI, identify the rationale and logic which guided the selection of interventions, assess whether previous recommendations were followed up, and conduct a process evaluation of selected interventions.

The main finding of the report is that the initiative is perceived as effective by partners with its main value added being its contribution to setting maternal and child health on the Indian agenda. In particular, partners felt that working through existing structures, rather than setting up additional implementing bodies, worked well and should be continued. Partners were also pleased with NIPI’s role as testing new and innovative measures to improve maternal and child health. On a less positive note, the initiative did not seem to follow up on many of the recommendations provided through various reviews and studies conducted during the initiative’s first phase, including a recommendation to develop a monitoring and results’ framework for the initiative. Hence the absence of a results framework during the initiatives first phase makes it difficult to assess whether the initiative has reached its stated objectives with respect to health outcomes, or indeed whether specific NIPI funded activities should be continued.

The Evaluation Department believes that the report provides useful findings and lessons learnt for NIPI’s partners at the outset of the second phase of the initiative. We therefore hope that this report will be used actively.