The Challenge Initiative (TCI) Next Gen programme builds on the TCI project (2016-2021) as part of a consortium led by the Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
To achieve TCI’s vision of transformed healthier cities at scale, the programme seeks to sustainably scale up high-impact family planning interventions that have been shown to be effective in similar geographies. It does this by supporting local governments both horizontally through more geographies and vertically through institutionalisation.
Our role
Itad helped TCI Next Gen by delivering a comprehensive monitoring, learning and evaluation plan to strengthens their activities. The plan included independently led cost-effectiveness, impact and process evaluations, with the shared purpose of empowering TCI Next Gen and its local government partners to achieve their goals.
Our work supported TCI to understand progress against its goals of capacity building, self reliance, scale-up and sustainability. Our evaluative techniques also provided insights on health systems strengthening and impacts related to contraceptive uptake.
Our methods and approaches
Our approach was structured around four carefully designed modules:
- Design and scoping of the monitoring, learning and evaluation framework: the co-development of a TCI theory of change (ToC); a fit-for-purpose monitoring, learning and evaluation plan; and accompanying results framework that provides robust measures for tracking outcomes.
- Evaluation: a package of complementary evaluations which will test TCIs ToC through an impact evaluation, a process evaluation and a cost effectiveness evaluation.
- Learning: an annual cycle of events and products that will support TCI, funders and the scale-up community in learning about and improving these and similar interventions.
- Programme monitoring and learning support: providing demand-led and proactive technical assistance to TCI global and hub teams, to operationalise the monitoring, learning and evaluation plan and track development and improvement monitoring systems.
Outputs and impact
Our evaluation found that TCI’s locally led ‘business-unusual’ approach is delivering measurable gains in urban family planning across Africa and Asia, improving contraceptive uptake, strengthening local systems, and generating cost savings for cities.
Executive summary of the final TCI report
News story on the evaluation findings
Blog: Making routine data work for impact evaluation
Scientific posters shared at the 2025 International Conference on Family Planning:
- Leveraging routine service statistics for impact evaluation: lessons from a multi-country interrupted time series study on contraceptive uptake
- Can the master coach model help sustain proven family planning (FP) interventions? Perspectives from master coaches
- Does The Challenge Initiative (TCI) offer a model for catalyzing the sustainable scale-up of proven family planning (FP) interventions?
