Dear CHIFA colleagues,
I received in my inbox today an announcement from the US-based NGO Results for Development about a new toolkit they have produced: 'Drawing on global evidence, the experiences of our government partners in Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania, and R4D’s decades of experience in health systems strengthening and early childhood development, this toolkit helps health system leaders, particularly those in low- and middle-income countries, identify where and how to strengthen primary health care to support optimal child development.'
You can download the toolkit here: https://r4d.org/phc-child-development-toolkit/?utm_source=newsletter&utm...
For me this raises a wider question that we can perhaps explore now or in a future Spotlight. Namely: When NGOs produce evidence-based guidance for national policymakers, how can they develop and present this guidance in a way that best complements (or indeed challenges) existing WHO normative guidance?
WHO is recognised as the lead organisation for normative guidance. They have published multiple normative and technical documents on nurturing care and primary health care, notably the Nurturing Care Handbook (2022) and Operationalizing Nurturing Care for Early Childhood Development (2019).
The R4D toolkit executive summary makes one reference to WHO: 'The toolkit is organized by the WHO’s Health System Building Blocks to identify where and how to strengthen PHC in support of young children’s development.' These blocks are accepted categories for health systems generally.
The WHO Nurturing Care Handbook is listed along with dozens of other publications in the final R4D topic module 'Resources and Tools for Promoting Nurturing Care in PHC'.
WHO itself categorises the Nurturing Care Handbook as a technical document rather than a normative one.
I can find no evidence that the development of the R4D toolkit has included collaboration with WHO.
Should NGOs developing technical and/or normative guidance for policymakers routinely coordinate with WHO to ensure that future publications complement WHO guidance?
Where NGOs produce guidance for policymakers, should they, like WHO, make clear that the guidance is technical and not normative, and should they explain how the new guidance (such as toolkits) complements existing WHO guidance?
I have not had time to study the toolkit in depth, so the answers to these questions may be there somewhere.
I raise this not as a criticism of R4D, but to open a discussion on how organisations can better coordinate to meet the information needs of policymakers.
This also relates to the increasing recognition that publications from different organisations often contain conflicting guidance.
Best wishes, Neil
CHIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org