HIPs project (SMART-HIPs)

EVIHDAF Countries: Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Ouagadougou Partnership Countries
Project Dates: June 2022– September 2023

Supporting Measurement and Replication Techniques of High Impact Practices (SMART – HIPs). SMART–HIPs, a project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, seeks to inform harmonized measurement standards for HIPs and to generate evidence to help countries reflect on and optimize implementation and scale-up of HIPs. Led by FHI 360 in partnership with EVIHDAF, the project takes place in Burkina Faso, India and Nigeria, with an additional assessment of the HIP landscape at the Ouagadougou Partnership (OP) level. SMART-HIPs complements a parallel activity currently funded by USAID under the Research for Scalable Solutions (R4S) project in Mozambique, Nepal and Uganda.

The target HIPS are:

  • Community Health Workers (CHWs): Integrate trained, equipped, and supported CHWs into the health system.
  • Immediate Postpartum Family Planning (IPPFP): Offer contraceptive counseling and services as part of facility-based childbirth care prior to discharge from the health facility.
  • Mass media (MM): Use mass media channels to support healthy reproductive behaviors.
  • Pharmacies and Drug Shops (PDS): Train and support pharmacies and drug shops to provide family planning information and a broad range of quality contraceptive methods.
  • Postabortion Family Planning (PAFP): Proactively offer voluntary contraceptive counseling and services at the same time and location where women receive facility-based postabortion care.

Our approach under this project involves: 1) Foundational activities to engage country stakeholders, define core components of the HIPs, map current implementation of relevant HIPs, and inventory indicators in use to monitor aspects of their implementation related to scale and reach; 2) an assessment of the scale, reach, quality and cost of implementing relevant HIPs; 3) an assessment of the HIP landscape in OP countries; and 4) building consensus to harmonize measurement standards (including core components and indicators) for HIP implementation and scale-up through country-level stakeholder engagement followed by a global consultation involving stakeholders from the countries and global stakeholders.