Population & Family Health

Together with partners including Health Partners International, Save the Children-UK, and GRID Consulting, the Mailman School of Public health is a partner in the Nigeria Northern States Maternal Newborn and Child Health (MNCH) program. The program’s objectives are to:

• Leverage operations research to redefine the institutional relationships, organizational alignment, and basic decision-making processes necessary for the MNCH program to succeed;
• Facilitate evidence as the principal criterion for decision-making to drive change in organizational practices and align resources with needs required to get MNCH in Northern Nigeria on track; and
• Ensure that adoption of practices and norms associated with evidence-based or knowledge culture play a key role in strengthening health system stewardship and improving health service uptake and delivery.

By the end of the program, it is expected that:

• The state ministries of health will engage in operations research, including a demographic surveillance system, to inform policy, systems and services development;
• Key opinion leaders in Northern Nigeria will have become part of the larger health systems research agenda, such as the INDEPTH Network of demographic surveillance sites, that is driving progressive development throughout sub-Saharan Africa; and
• Operations research will have become the publicly recognized organizing principle for systems development among state and other development partners.

The development of systems and services proposed by the MNCH program depends crucially on the creation and utilization of knowledge. Our strategy places operations research (OR) at the centre of program development, with experience and insight gained from the development, execution, and utilization of research - a lynchpin among program outputs. The focus for our OR strategy is much wider than generation and utilization of knowledge for program development alone. Our proposition is to employ OR as a lever for changing the institutional relationships, organizational alignment, and basic decision-making processes necessary for the MNCH program to succeed. This project is funded with a grant from DFID.

Photo Credit: Ann McCarthur