With funding from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, FHI 360, and other partners, including Evidence for Sustainable Human Development Systems in Africa (EVIHDAF) and Akena Associates, are implementing the SMART-HIPs Project. SMART-HIPs seeks to inform and harmonize measurement standards for HIPs and to generate evidence to help countries reflect on and optimize the implementation and scale-up of High Impact Practices (HIPs) of Family Planning (FP).

The project is being implemented in Burkina Faso, India, and Nigeria, with an additional assessment of the HIP landscape at the Ouagadougou Partnership level. SMART-HIPs complements a parallel activity currently funded by USAID under FHI 360’s Research for Scalable Solutions (R4S) project in Mozambique, Nepal and Uganda. The projects will map HIP implementers and inventory indicators to monitor HIP implementation; conduct a cross-sectional observational assessment of the scale, reach, quality and cost of implementing a sub-set of HIPs, using an approach intended to be replicable by country programs.

In Nigeria, SMART-HIPs will be implemented in Kaduna and Lagos states and focus on two service delivery HIPs (post-abortion family planning, as well as drug shops/pharmacies) and one social and behavioral change HIP (mass media).

SMART-HIPs will address five specific objectives over the course of 9 months:

1.        Measure the current horizontal and vertical scale of implementation of three HIPs.

2.        Measure the current reach of selected HIPs to sub-populations by age, urban/rural location of service delivery points, and other dimensions of equity as feasible and relevant.

3.        Assess the quality of implementation of selected HIPs, including policy-level intention and readiness of services to offer the intended standard of care.

4.        Estimate the costs of implementing and sustaining the implementation and identify the cost drivers and efficiencies for selected HIPs.

5.        Develop and recommend measurement standards for HIP implementation and scale-up.