New MOMENTUM Landscape Reviews on Measuring and Assessing Capacity and Partnership
November 2nd, 2021 | news
Global health work embraces approaches that focus on building capacity and partnerships, but how do we measure the effectiveness of complex concepts that center on the development of skills, processes, and relationships? Through USAID’s MOMENTUM Knowledge Accelerator, JSI recently produced two landscape reviews focusing on capacity and partnerships—how each is conceptualized and measured in the literature, and importantly, how they can be incorporated into project programming. Both reviews are highly applicable across the global health context.
Measuring and Assessing Capacity: A Landscape Review
This landscape review aims to support MOMENTUM partner efforts to introduce, deliver, scale up, and sustain high-quality maternal, newborn, and child health services through sound capacity measurement. The review defines the different levels and types of capacity relevant to MOMENTUM that can be measured; clarifies the distinction between capacity and performance; identifies key capacity measurement tool types and assesses their general suitability for capturing capacities relevant to MOMENTUM; and proposes promising approaches for capacity measurement, capacity indicators and capacity measurement tool selection that reflect the operational realities of MOMENTUM partners.
Moving beyond capacity assessment tools, the landscape review takes a systems thinking, complexity-aware monitoring lens to examine linkages between capacity and performance improvement, also tying in resilience capacity.
Approaches to Partnership Measurement: A Landscape Review
Providing an overview of the current state of partnership measurement approaches, frameworks, and metrics used to measure partnerships in global health, this landscape review informs selection of evidence-informed, appropriate, and feasible measurement indicators to monitor partnerships within the MOMENTUM consortium.
Findings highlight three main recommendations: 1. Develop context-specific measurement approaches for the partnership. 2. Use of a variety of indicators and mixed-methods approaches to capture partnership complexity, outcome diversity, and contributions of partnerships to outcomes. 3. Prioritize participatory approaches and engage all partners in the process.
