MCHIP's Private Voluntary Organizations/Nongovernmental Organization (PVO/NGO) support team provides technical assistance in program design, monitoring, implementation and evaluation to grantees supported through USAID's Child Survival and Health Grants Program (CSHGP), the President's Malaria Initiative's Malaria Communities Program (MCP), and other NGOs participating in USAID Mission supported initiatives.

With a focus on equity and sustainability, the PVO/NGO support team offers expertise in monitoring and evaluation, maternal and child health and infectious disease interventions, organizational development, and health information systems. The team aims to maximize the inclusion of PVO/NGO contributions in the scale-up of proven interventions at the country level.

Priorities
Experience from the CSHGP can be used as a key resource when scaling up child health programs due to the program’s parallel strategic focus and rigorous evaluation protocols. MCHIP country programs offer clear opportunities to incorporate learning emerging from CSHGP grants. Priority areas where MCHIP leverages this experience include:

• Global leadership, documentation of learning, and diffusion of lessons emerging from the CSHGP, particularly information related to program strategy implementation among underserved populations;
• Catalytic efforts to strengthen connections and ongoing learning between CSHGP grantees and MCHIP country activities; 
• Ongoing technical support to CSHGP grantees to ensure a high level of rigor and quality across the portfolio of grants; and
• Management support to the CSHGP to ensure clear guidance to grantees for program design and implementation, including alignment with USAID and MCHIP priorities.

MCHIP focuses efforts on documenting and widely diffusing the experience of the CSHGP grantees themselves. A cohort of CSHGP grantees submits midterm and final evaluation reports each year. These reports provide important learning that informs MCHIP’s global efforts. MCHIP’s PVO/NGO support team analyzes this data annually and distills information to be presented in a variety of forums, including international conferences, brown bag presentations, and for wide dissemination through the MCHIP NGO website.

To learn more, visit: http://www.mchipngo.net.

USAID’s Child Survival and Health Grants Program
Through the CSHGP, USAID annually funds PVO grantees to implement four to five year programs in collaboration with local partners to deliver high-impact maternal, newborn and child health interventions to communities and reduce maternal and child deaths. The objectives of the CSHGP are to:

• Pilot and analyze new approaches to introduce and scale up high-impact interventions in diverse communities, including urban and post-conflict settings; 
• Contribute to overcoming key operational barriers to scaling up delivery of these interventions through the provision of technical leadership and specialized technical resources; and
• Disseminate evidence and lessons of proven models for the delivery of high-impact integrated interventions.

Evaluative rigor is built into these programs through the collection of 19 standard, population-level indicators at baseline and end of project, strong monitoring and evaluation plans, and in the case of the program’s 17 Innovation Grants Operations Research designs—all of which are supported and reviewed by MCHIP technical advisors and other external experts. The population-level data generated through this program have demonstrated that CSHGP grantees have consistently increased coverage in key interventions over the national average from baseline to end of project, and have achieved an average estimated mortality reduction of 22% for children under five over the life of project.

Global Leadership
MCHIP’s PVO/NGO support team has positioned the contributions of the CSHGP portfolio within the broader global health community through global leadership activities. Particular emphasis has been on promoting the CSHGP within technical areas that underscore the role of community health systems and among key actors working on country-level efforts to scale up. 

Activities have included efforts to:

• Ensure operations research studies undertaken by grantees are of high quality: 
• Support the publication of CSHGP-related data in peer-reviewed journals;
• Participate in interagency working groups (CORE Group); and 
• Solicit the input of internationally recognized experts when developing key tools and resources that guide CSHGP grantee programs.

Technical Support to CSHGP Grantees
The PVO/NGO support team provides individualized technical support to 39 active CSHGP grantees implementing programs in the Innovation, New Partner, Expanded Impact, and Tuberculosis grant categories. MCHIP engages CSHGP grantees from the first phases of their grant award to ensure that a strong project design is developed and reflected in the grantee’s detailed implementation plan (DIP), which is submitted six months from the date of award. The Program sponsors an annual New Grantee Orientation Event to ensure an efficient startup of the DIP development process, and offers an Operations Research Planning workshop within the first three months post-award. 

Technical advisors from the PVO/NGO support team conduct regular (monthly) check-in meetings with grantees to ensure progress on their operations research and overall program designs during and after the DIP preparation period. The technical advisors conduct a thorough review of each project’s midterm evaluation in collaboration with USAID’s CSHGP team and provide feedback to guide an overall quality check on each program. A subsection of MCHIP’s public website is dedicated to housing resources that grantees can quickly access to answer basic questions about the key technical interventions in the program, and to access tools and resources that are commonly used to guide these programs.