Resource Library
CORE Group, in collaboration with multiple partner and member organizations, has produced a range of state-of-the-art tools, curriculums and technical resources.
ORGANIZATION
CORE Group
YEAR PUBLISHED
2000
DESCRIPTION
The Bureau of Humanitarian Relief/Private Voluntary Cooperation (BHR/PVC) committed itself to a field review of post-grant sustainability once during the life of the PVC Strategic Plan (1996-2000). In February-March, 2000, a consultant was contracted to do an exploratory study of the sustainability of child survival grants in two countries: Bangladesh and Bolivia. The study consisted of a review of available grant documents; interviews with current and former staff of each PVO and NGO partner and with government officials; and visits to the former working areas of three PVOs/NGOs with more recently-completed grants. The 32 grants included in the study were administered by 13 U.S. registered PVOs along with partners and community groups.It is hoped that this review of the experience with 32 grants in two countries in separate regions will provide a good indication of whether child survival programs are having a lasting influence on child and maternal health as well as suggest ways in which sustainability and the monitoring of sustainability can be more institutionalized within the child survival grants system.
ORGANIZATION
CORE Group
USAID
YEAR PUBLISHED
2002
DESCRIPTION
This guide is for managers, field supervisors, and others who plan, monitor and evaluate community health programs. Most often, the people who have such a responsibility also have to collect data as one of their tasks. The guide will aid them to train others in a simple and rapid method for collecting data to use for planning, monitoring and evaluating community health programs. The method is called Lot Quality Assurance Sampling (LQAS). LQAS has been used by industry for about 75 years for quality-control purposes. But it has been adapted for use by community health practitioners over the past 15 years. LQAS is now used all over the world in community health programs for the following purposes: (1) assessing coverage of key health knowledge and practices in maternal and child health, family planning, and HIV/AIDS; (2) assessing the quality of health worker performance; and (3) assessing disease prevalence. This guide presents LQAS in a very user-friendly way so that almost any supervisor or community health worker can be trained in how to use the method for the first purpose mentioned above—which is the most often-used application.
ORGANIZATION
CORE Group
Food Security and Nutrition Network
USAID
Food for the Hungry
World Relief
YEAR PUBLISHED
2014
DESCRIPTION
This manual was developed as a training resource for designing, training, implementing and monitoring Care Group (CG) programs. It seeks to help CG approach implementers to clearly understand the structure of the CG approach, how to establish CGs, how to monitor the work of CGs and assess their impact, and how to maintain the quality of the approach through supportive supervision and quality control.
*NEW* Care Groups: A Reference Guide for Practitioners is meant to serve as a companion to the training manual. It was developed in response to practitioner requests and assumes the reader already has a general understanding of the Care Group methodology.
ORGANIZATION
CORE Group
YEAR PUBLISHED
2016
DESCRIPTION
This Call to Action was drafted following the Fall 2015 CORE Group workshop entitled “Behavior Change in the Age of Complexity” and subsequently presented at the International SBCC Summit 2016 and the Spring 2016 CORE Group Meeting. Feedback from audiences at these events has been incorporated into this version of the Call.
The aim of this Call to Action is to:
- Advocate for the support of M&E of SBC interventions that capture the unpredictability of the change process and reflect the realities of project implementation.
- Show that proven M&E methods that are appropriately adaptive in response to emergent needs and opportunities can help monitor complexity.
- Argue that M&E methods that do not address the complexity of both behavior and of program implementation can distort our understanding of SBC
- Support the claim that data gathered through community feedback and iteration not only can accelerate individual behavior change, but can propel social change.
- Champion the use of participatory, narrative, mixed methods and learning-based approaches that align with what we know about the context and complexity of SBC program implementation.
ORGANIZATION CORE Group
YEAR PUBLISHED 2021
DESCRIPTION
CORE Group’s Social and Behavior Change (SBC) Working Group has developed a set of complexity-aware tools are designed to help design and evaluate SBC-focused interventions. Tools in this set include:
- An advocacy brief to help guide communication with donors and to help build fluency in communicating how to monitor and evaluate SBC interventions
- A core set of indicators related to adaptation, learning, and collaboration that can be used in proposals and work plans
- A checklist intended to help in the consistency and completeness of documenting SBC interventions.
Complexity is a key factor—perhaps the key factor—in social and behavior change (SBC) programming. Complexity affects most SBC interventions through:
- Contextual complexity; the fact that the environment and implementation process itself shape outcomes of an intervention.
- Temporal complexity; interventions evolve over time as target population and implementers change behaviors, and come to new understandings, and programmatic environments shift in response to new constraints, opportunities and priorities.
- Interpretive complexity; as interventions are social activities, practitioners should acknowledge that every stakeholder understands the intervention partially and differently and has a unique perspective
View the Call to Action
ORGANIZATION
CORE Group
USAID
WI-HER
YEAR PUBLISHED
2015
DESCRIPTION
This technical resource guide, along with the complementary technical brief, is designed to build the capacity of development practitioners working in nutrition and food security to plan, implement, and evaluate gender-sensitive SBC programming in order to improve nutritional outcomes for pregnant and lactating women (PLW) and children under two. It does this by providing an overview, rationale, critical actions, best practices, resources, and tools for integrating gender-sensitive SBC into project activities.
The technical resource guide seeks to achieve three main goals:
- Increase the reader’s knowledge about the importance of gender-sensitive SBC programming in nutrition and food security programs/projects;
- Strengthen the planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation (M&E), and documentation of gender-sensitive projects and gender mainstreaming of organizations to reduce gender gaps in nutrition outcomes; and
- Share resources and tools to support gender-sensitive SBC programming
ORGANIZATION
Johns Hopkins University
YEAR PUBLISHED
2001
DESCRIPTION
The present guide, is an updated version of the Survey Trainer’s Guide by The Johns Hopkins University. The KPC2000+ is a revision of the original questionnaire developed by PVO CSSP, and is a product of the Child Survival Technical Support Project (CSTS) and the CORE Monitoring and Evaluation Working Group (MEWG). Like the original KPC manual, the KPC2000+ Field Guide aims to assist projects in planning, conducting, and analyzing a KPC survey. The present guide contains expanded sections on sampling options for KPC surveys, KPC data analysis, and the use of KPC data for health decisionmaking. It also stresses the importance of incorporating qualitative research, partnership-building, and capacity development into the KPC process.
ORGANIZATION
CORE Group
USAID
YEAR PUBLISHED
2004
DESCRIPTION
The Maternal and Newborn Standards and Indicators Compendium is designed to assist program designers working for international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) develop high quality programs focused on women and children. The Maternal and Newborn Standards and Indicators Compendium is the result of a three-year collaborative effort led by the Safe Motherhood/Reproductive Health (SMRH) Working Group, CORE Group. In addition, more than 40 experts in the fields of safe motherhood, reproductive health, child survival, and program design, monitoring, evaluation, and implementation contributed to this effort by providing technical comments, providing illustrations, and offering suggestions in the design of the Compendium. These contributing experts represent USAID Cooperating Agencies (CAs), US-based international NGOs, universities, and USAID staff members.
Social accountability interventions present various approaches that support citizens’ participation, direct or indirect, in dialogue with service providers and other officials with a goal of developing a collaborative relationship to improve quality of service provision. Despite recent attention on social accountability interventions, progress on updating or adapting how these interventions are monitored and evaluated has been slow. A better understanding of how social accountability interventions are monitored and evaluated can support greater collective learning on implementing and studying social accountability and such collective learning can support adaptations to social accountability interventions that are more likely to be embedded, scaled-up, and institutionalized. This literature review aims to summarize how social accountability interventions are monitored and evaluated, provide an overview of the current landscape of social accountability, and conclude with key issues related to the monitoring and evaluation of social accountability that merit further discussion and reflection.
This resource was created in partnership with Save the Children and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
ORGANIZATION
CORE Group
USAID
YEAR PUBLISHED
2012
DESCRIPTION
The CORE Group Polio Project (CGPP) and its partners in India, Angola, and Ethiopia have led successful social mobilization efforts to reach difficult-to-access populations critical for polio eradication. These include extremely poor rural and urban communities, ethnic and religious minorities who resist immunizing their children, and others such as newborns, pastoralists, migrants, and those in transit across national borders. Working through grassroots nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), CGPP social mobilization activities have contributed to the current polio-free status in all three countries and have improved the coverage of children’s routine immunizations as well. Marking a shift from the earlier dominance of epidemiological perspectives, today behavior-change communication — advocacy, interpersonal communication, and social mobilization — is recognized internationally as the way forward in this final phase of polio eradication.
This shift is reflected in WHO’s May 2012 Global Polio Emergency Plan:
- Establish/scale up social mobilization networks at community level in infected areas;
- Undertake systematic monitoring to identify and understand the social reasons for chronically missed children;
- Build interpersonal skills to enhance vaccination performance, including addressing reticence and refusal;
- Apply best practices for reaching high-risk and chronically missed children (e.g., migrant and underserved);
- Re-energize public support, motivate vaccinators, enhance ownership of key stakeholders (media, physicians), and increase local leader accountability; and 6) Apply to routine immunization lessons on identifying and reaching missed children, especially among underserved, mobile, and minority populations.
This report places CGPP within the context of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) that began in 1988, defines and describes three varieties of social mobilization, and presents as case examples CGPP’s successful social mobilization work in India, Angola, and Ethiopia. It is intended for those interested in best practices to move polio eradication from its current 99.9 percent success rate to 100 percent, and all who want to “reach the hardly reached” with routine immunization, new vaccines and other life-saving maternal and child health services.
ORGANIZATION
Helen Keller International
YEAR PUBLISHED
2004
DESCRIPTION
The purpose of the guide is to consolidate lessons learned on the process of integrating vitamin A supplementation (VAS) into community-directed treatment with ivermectin (CDTI), and to promote replication of the experience. The Guide is designed to: Introduce key concepts, principles, issues, and terminology related to integration of VAS into CDTI; Outline practical guidelines and steps that may be useful in the design, adaptation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of integrated VAS and CDTI activities in your country or project areas; Provide information on sources and resources of support programs, tools on onchocerciasis and vitamin A deficiency (VAD) control, and integration of VAS into CDTI.
ORGANIZATION
CORE Group
YEAR PUBLISHED
2013
DESCRIPTION
This manual is a guide for non-governmental organizations carrying out child health programs to assess under-five mortality rates and evaluate programs using the CARE Group Model. By following this manual’s methodology to establish a Mortality Assessment for Health Programs (MAP) System, organizations can collect valid and precise information about vital events and detect statistically significant changes in under-five mortality rates over the life of a child health program. Our hope is that NGOs will find this manual practical and feasible to assess correlations between program activities and mortality trends in a variety of settings.
Links from Manual:
- Vital Events Database (ZIP)
- Pregnancy and Birth Register (PDF)
- Under Five Death Register (PDF)
- U5MR Trend Chart Creator (ZIP)
- Promoter Vital Event Monitoring Report Card – Chart Creator (XLS)
ORGANIZATION
USAID
YEAR PUBLISHED
2017
DESCRIPTION
Civil society organizations (CSOs) are increasingly joining forces with public health personnel at the local and national levels to provide greater scrutiny of programs and budgets. Described as “social accountability,” common themes include: preparation and planning; involvement of marginalized and impoverished populations; identification of barriers for effective participation; interface meetings between civil society and governmental/public sector; measurable indicators of accountability and health outcomes; and rigorous evaluations of interventions.
These social accountability resources and tools are intended to assist CSOs, non-governmental organizations, and government health program planners, managers and staff to identify and adapt existing guides and tools for effective social accountability strategies.
The materials are divided into four sections: