Thursday, March 21, 2019 (9:30am-11:00am )

Grandmother Project - Change through Culture

In order to develop culturally-grounded programs it is important to understand the roles and influence of different family and community members related to reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health. Focus on Families and Culture allows for those involved either in coordinating formative research studies or for those preparing a scope of work for qualitative community formative research. The tool was developed by CORE Group member, Grandmother Project - Change through Culture, through a small grant funded by The TOPS Program. Read More

Friday, February 22, 2019 (9:00am-10:30am )

Monitoring and Evaluation Working Group

Development strategies aimed at behavior change will miss the mark if they do not adequately identify culture and plan interventions that factor in the cultural nuances around particular behaviors. As management guru Peter Drucker once said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” To best serve our clients, we must go beyond mere clinical provision and sensitization to also accommodate the social culture where we work - embracing family structures, community norms, and institutional relationships. Further, to deliver quality care, we must be able to engage the input and participation of our clients as partners in improving health. This online event presented a variety of applied effective approaches to address the challenges above. Read More

Thursday, February 21, 2019 (9:00am-10:00am )

Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health Working Group

CORE Group's Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health Working Group hosted a webinar on confidentiality and adolescent reproductive health services, as provided in low- and middle-income countries. The discussion, led by young health advocates, revolved around case studies examining What works? What doesn't work? How do national health policies protect  (or threaten) confidentiality?Read More

Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Joe Valadez of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine presented on a new statistical technique called Hybrid Prevalence Estimation, a way of improving the accuracy/estimates from routine health information systems using surveys to adjust. Hybrid Prevalence Estimation addresses the major problem that HMIS systems (like DHIS2) are rolling out across the world without any accompanying measure of their error. Read More

Friday, February 15, 2019 (8:30am EST )

WHO, USAID MCSP, CORE Group

Webinar to disseminate the new WHO Guideline on health policy and system support to optimize community health worker programmes (CHW guideline) and highlight additional resources On Friday, February 15, 8:30-10:00am EST, the World Health Organization (WHO), USAID’s flagship Maternal and Child Survival Program (MCSP) and CORE Group hosted a webinar to disseminate the new WHO community health workers (CHW) guideline that was launched on October 26, ...Read More

Tuesday, February 5, 2019 (9:30am-11:00am )

Community-centered Health Systems Strengthening Working Group

The Health Systems Assessment Approach: A How-To Manual (HSAA) was first published in 2007 by USAID and has been used in more than 30 countries. This webinar introduced Version 3.0 of the publication.Presentation and discussion revolved around: What's new?, What is the HSAA method and how does it add value? How and where has the HSAA been used? How can the HSAA address community health?Read More

Tuesday, December 11, 2018 (9:00am-10:30am )

CORE Group's M&E Working Group

This webinar brought together experts in the fields of M&E, research, knowledge management , and peer reviewed publishing to answer questions and give tips and tricks to mine and share relevant learning and evidence with country counterparts and the global community. Panelists included: Sujata Bijou, IntraHealth, has spent over fifteen years in international program design, implementation, monitoring, quality improvement, evaluation, and ...Read More

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

This expert consultation started with the premise that social and behavior change (SBC) interventions often sidestep advances in public health theory and research regarding complexity and context-sensitivity. Although a growing body of literature continues to support what most SBC professionals have long known—that effective SBC interventions are those that accommodate local conditions and shifts in those conditions—many on-the-ground practices lag ...Read More

Tuesday, October 23, 2018 (9:00am-10:30am )

CORE Group's M&E Working Group

This webinar focused on how the Principles for Digital Development (PDD) can be applied to selecting and using digital and mobile monitoring and evaluation tools. Sharing sessions included: Allana Nelson, Digital Impact Alliance, reviewed the thinking and rationale behind the nine Principles and how these Principles can help you and your team select the choice and creation of technology-enabled programs. Allana also ...Read More

Wednesday, October 3, 2018 (9:30am-11:00am )

As a leader in nutrition globally, the U.S. government is committed to enhancing health, productivity, and human potential through improved nutrition. In 2016, U.S. government agencies working on domestic and global nutrition released the U.S. Government Global Nutrition Coordination Plan to harness the diverse nutrition investments across the government, and to increase inter-agency communication, collaboration, and research-sharing to catalyze progress ...Read More

Monday, September 17, 2018 (1:00pm-2:00pm )

Social & Behavior Change Working Group

Carol Dweck and colleagues have researched the impact of simple, psychological interventions with students to address motivational or non-cognitive factors that influence student academic performance. Her research shows that this can matter even more than cognitive factors, and in fact, those students who have struggled the most, have the greatest benefit from these interventions. In this Journal Club, Joel Mercado ...Read More

Thursday, August 2, 2018 (9:30am )

CORE Group

USAID is working with governments to meet health goals. Kelly Saldana, USAID’s Director of the Office of Health Systems, discusses the findings of the 2018 Acting on the Call report, highlighting progress made, and discussing areas that require additional strengthening to foster self-reliance. The session will also feature time for question and answer.Read More

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

CORE Group

Thorough, robust gender integration has proven to be a vital component of effective SBCC strategies. This webinar seeks to highlight distinct methods of gender integration throughout the program cycle for comprehensive SBCC using examples and experiences from three diverse organizations - CARE, ACDI/VOCA, and SPRING/Senegal.Read More

Thursday, May 10, 2018 (1:00pm-2:00pm EDT (GMT-05:00) )

CORE Group's M&E Working Group

Project Concern International (PCI) set an ambitious goal for 2020 in their strategic plan – to “help transform 20 million lives”.  Counting the number of beneficiaries is the easy part.  But what about measuring transformation? During this webinar, Janine Schooley shared an overview of the “Transformometer”, which was designed to measure the likelihood of transformative impact at project and individual levels.  ...Read More

Wednesday, May 9, 2018 (10:00AM-12:00PM )

SID-Washington's Health & Nutrition Workgroup and CORE Group Social and Behavior Change Working Group

This panel discussed the ways in which Social Behavior Change Communications (SBCC) has been integrated at different levels within a health system, by whom, and how, including the processes used for developing an SBCC strategy and set of interventions that are integrated.Read More

Thursday, March 15, 2018 (11:00am-12:00pm EDT (GMT-04:00) )

CORE Group's Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, and Adolescent Health Working Group

This CORE Group Webinar highlighted the outcomes from recent global health meetings (International Associate for Adolescent Health Congress and the Global NCDs Forum). For those who were not able to attend these meetings, presenters reviewed key takeaways, and encouraged a discussion of actions and thoughts moving forward.Read More

Wednesday, February 21, 2018 (10:00am -11:00am EST )

PLAN International, Advancing Synergy, NCD Child

The webinar featured three presentations about NCDs prevention, in the context of the SDGs and young people's health and outcomes of the recent Global NCD Forum, with a focus on the roadmap to the UN High Level Meeting on NCDs will be discussed. Read More

Tuesday, February 20, 2018 (11:00am-12:00pm EST )

CORE Group SBC Working Group in collaboration with the FSN Network SBC Task Force

Are we forgetting the role of socio-cognitive systems and communities in behavior change? The paper discusses a systems approach for community-centric design that details the interplay between biomedical and traditional socio-cognitive systems, as well as between "Western" and "Eastern" worldviews. The authors suggest that only by understanding the interplay between these can sustainable behavioral change interventions be designed. The authors applied the community-centric design approach to an intervention aimed at reducing neonatal mortality in Uttar Pradesh, India. Over the course of 16 months, their intervention led to a 54% reduction in NMR as well as unanticipated improvements in maternal health. Following a brief presentation of the journal article, there will be an open exchange of idea on the feasibility of implementing this approach in behavior change programs as well as the extent to which it has been successfully implemented to date.Read More

Friday, January 12, 2018 (12;00pm ET - 1:00pm ET )

CORE Group's Monitoring & Evaluation Working Group

During this webinar, Guy Sharrock (Catholic Relief Services) delved into the method of Evaluative Thinking, how to use it, and shared his experiences with ET in CRS programming around the world.Read More

Tuesday, January 9, 2018 (11:00am-12:00pm EST )

What is the role of mass media for behavior change, especially when the behavior is a complex one, like exclusive breastfeeding? And can TV spots alone change mothers' behaviors? Mass media is a logical tool for reaching enough families to have a population-wide effect on health behaviors. Yet there is a dearth of evidence on mass media’s impact on breastfeeding. With support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Alive & Thrive conducted an evaluation of its "talking babies" TV spots to understand whether and how they may have contributed to the rapid increase in exclusive breastfeeding in Viet Nam. The evaluation was built on behavioral theory and formative findings. It included creation, testing, and refinement of questions to measure the likely behavioral determinants. During this webinar, two of the article's authors shared what the TV spots alone did – and did not – accomplish. Following a brief presentation on the journal article, the webinar included an open exchange of ideas on the practicality of investing in mass media for behavior change.Read More