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Health

Health Practice

We have 25 years of experience as a global social impact consulting firm and use 360-degree approach that improves the well-being of vulnerable communities. CMS and its sister organisation, Swasti, a global south public health agency, partners with communities at the last mile to help them realise their potential through health and well-being. We work to achieve Universal Health Care and Global Health Security.

Community System Strengthening: People-centric outcomes through Swasti

Health System Strengthening: Institution and policy outcomes through CMS

Key Domains We Work In

Comprehensive Primary Health

Changing the way health services are for vulnerable communities. Sector shaping work through Invest4Wellness (i4We), a system innovation in primary healthcare and Comprehensive Primary Health Care (CPHC) Alliance to strengthen primary health care.

Early diagnosis

Detecting symptoms, health concerns and disease trends through sector shaping work like self-testing initiatives, screening & testing, and integrated disease surveillance.

Technology & Digital Health

Providing appropriate cutting-edge technology solutions to enable vulnerable groups to achieve well-being. Sector shaping work through Call4Svasth, telecare for the vulnerable, using point-of-care diagnostics in our community health interventions, DICEFlow for our primary healthcare work, and using data science, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Machine Learning models (ML) as essential components of our approach to environmental surveillance.

SRHR & Maternal health

Empowering adolescent girls, women, and sexual minorities to protect their health and rights. Sector shaping work through Saarthi Health Innovation Platform (SHIP) to scale-up Manyata to at least 1000 new social healthcare enterprises (SHEs) in key states of India by 2024 and membership at Asia Pacific Alliance for SRHR.

One Health + Planetary Health

Coordinating with human, animal and environmental health partners for successful public health interventions. Sector shaping work through Precision Health Platform, surveillance using environmental tools and Green Health Alliance.

Other priority domains include Mental Health, Social Determinants of Health, Inclusive Health Systems for Special Populations, and Innovative Financing & Health Entrepreneurship.

The Practice Works with Various Partner Types:

  • Local to National Governments
  • Regional Government bodies
  • UN Agencies
  • Bilateral and Multilateral Agencies
  • Large Civil Society Networks representing the cause of vulnerable populations

Key Initiatives

Transforming the city of Bhopal into a ‘Healthy City’ based on WHO’s long-running Healthy Cities framework concentrating on the Social Determinants of Health in five pillars:

The initiative has been successful with support from National Health Mission, Government of Madhya Pradesh and HSTP

Developed effective strategies for COVID-19 vaccination and building resilience with support from Rockefeller Foundation in 3 SEAR countries

National QI Coordinating Agency & Technology Agency for Manyata 4.0 aims to scale up Manyata to at least 1000 new social healthcare enterprises (SHEs) in key states of India by 2024 with support from MSD for Mothers, a global healthcare initiative for women

Built the resilience among workers and businesses of factories against Covid-19 and future crises of over 40,000 workers from 14 RMG factories of Amazon Supply Chains located districts of Bangladesh with support from Amazon

Launched India’s first city-wide environmental surveillance system in 5 cities with the aim to develop a comprehensive yet decentralised environmental surveillance system with support from Skoll Foundation

Facilitated the Learning for Impact L4I knowledge collaborative by USAID India

Conducted a process evaluation of India’s first health-focused ‘development impact bond’ (DIB) to generate insights on the prospective role of performance-based financing mechanisms in global health programming

Designed the National Drug Control Master Plan (NDCMP) II for the Government of Nigeria to combat the challenges of addiction and trafficking

Conducted an evaluation of the World Health Organisation’s Regional Office for South East Asia’s (WHO SEARO) Collaborating Centers

Together with Swasti, raised over one billion USD from the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria

Alliances and Platforms

Creating impact, orchestrating results, and shaping the sector of primary health care, environmental health, and climate change through our platforms and multi-partner alliances.

The practice area has representation under some of the most prestigious boards and panels:

WHO Alliance for Transformative Action on Climate and Health (ATACH)

WHO Knowledge Sharing Platform

Scientific and Industrial Research Organizations (SIRO)

Global Learning Collaborative for Health Systems Resilience

MIT Solve Health Leadership

Asia Pacific Alliance for SRHR

Pivoting Towards Climate-Responsive Healthy Days

#100MillionHealthyDays:

Building stronger evidence on measuring healthy days

Climate Change and Health:

Climate change has resulted in extreme weather conditions that have a serious impact on health. Through climate-responsive programs, we hope to build the resilience of vulnerable communities.

To learn more about the work we do, contact us at:

[email protected]
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Transforming Investments

Learning for Impact

CMS recognises that a systematic effort to capture, use and share learnings is the cornerstone of effective strategy, action and implementation. Towards this, we bring the following strengths:

  • We are a learning organisation with 20+ years of experience. Our sister organisations, our strong, diverse and vast partnerships and our breadth of work provide us a 360-degree view of development

  • We work with the best partners and programmes in the field and are always open to learning from them

  • We carry our own experiments into our field labs on a range of issues

  • We have developed a number of tools and solutions over time, across a variety of subject areas, and catalogued them for our partners to use

We facilitate organisations and programmes to learn through:

  • Designing and operationalising systems for learning and knowledge management

  • Support and facilitate reflection, documentation and dissemination, using learning lenses through different forums

  • Synthesis of research and experiences

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Transforming Investments

Monitor for Results

We believe that information is power. We move our partners up the evidence-to-results chain through world-class monitoring systems that enable timely and informed decisions.

From over 25 years of experience with monitoring, we believe:

  • Information from monitoring systems feeds into four areas: Planning, Accountability, Learning, Performance Management (PALP)

  • Systems should be use-focused and owned by users

  • Comprehensiveness is important, but for users, simplicity is key

  • A good blend of quantitative and qualitative information is essential for insight

  • Priorities will change, so systems should evolve with their needs

  • Clarity and consensus on how information will be used are critical for action

Some of our work in this area:

Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning for Avahan India AIDS Initiative Phase III across five high HIV-prevalence states in South India. We worked with 87 community organisations, reaching a key population of 1,36,000+ to design and implement technology-driven MEAL systems for better data-based decision making.

Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning System for the Poorest Areas Civil Society Programme (PACS-I) across six states of India; designed and implemented the entire system covering – inputs, activities, processes, outputs, outcomes and impact for four years; covering over 300-odd civil society organisations in India. The project was implemented by Development Alternatives and supported by the Department for International Development (DFID).

Designing and Operationalising a Participatory Monitoring System for Eastern and Western India Rainfed Farming Projects, supported by DFID-India.

Design of a monitoring, evaluation and learning framework and tool to support the implementation of an Institutional Network Strengthening Programme, with a specific focus on the Asia-Pacific region, for Transparency International (TI).

Monitoring system for United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Nigeria in supporting the National Drug Law Enforcement Authority (NDLEA), which is leading the National Drug Control Master Plan (NDCMP), in partnership with 37 Ministries/agencies.

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Transforming Investments

Evidence for Change

In Evidence for Change, we specialise in facilitating theories of change, alternate analysis, results frameworks, and tools, building evidence through pluralistic methodologies, participatory learning, and action, and establishing efficient monitoring, evaluation, and learning systems through a multidisciplinary approach.

We specialise in designing and conducting research and evaluation in multiple domains, with a variety of partners through a collaborative process.

We deliver quality impact evaluations through rigorous experimental, quasi-experimental, mixed-method and qualitative methods, nationally and internationally. Our focus areas include conducting impact assessments, programme evaluations, summative and performance evaluations, action research, exploratory and formative assessments, literature reviews, sectoral studies, and organisational assessments, amongst others.

We have partnered with experts from Stanford University, International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), Statistics for Sustainable Development (Stats4SD), Institute of Rural Management, Krea University, Tufts University, University of Reading, University of Oregon, Purdue University, Indian Statistical Institute, etc.

We have carried out over 100 project/programme evaluations and organisational assessments, using methods and approaches that help communities and programme staff to reflect, assess, learn and apply strategies. The team has strong experience in using evidence to contribute to shaping public and organisational policies and improving programme strategies.

Recently, the team (CMS and 3ie) working with the Government, concluded the evaluation of the National Rural Livelihood Project’s (NRLP) programme working on women empowerment and decision-making within the household through access to credit. We studied the impact of the programme and institutional support that SHG provides to women with the aim of providing a sustainable livelihood and financial inclusion. We measured the decision-making capacity of women based on the responses recorded to 26 questions that covered a variety of scenarios within households, such as food, children, education, assets and finance.

Other examples of our work include

  • Impact evaluation using experimental design for Breakthrough’s innovative programme utilising mass and community media to address the issue of Early Marriage across three districts in Bihar and Jharkhand

  • Literature review of interventions facilitating smallholder farmers’ access to the market in India using the hierarchy of study design. The study aimed to understand the current scenario and also to provide insights into the sustainability of the producer organisations as institutions

  • Formative research to understand the effect of seasonality and agriculture on the nutrition of pregnant and lactating women and children under five and household coping mechanisms in four districts in Madhya Pradesh

 

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Transforming Investments

Design for Success

We implement landscape, feasibility and needs assessments, all leading up to the design of development interventions. We believe design is a significant factor in the effectiveness, impact and sustainability of such interventions. We create designs using human-centred design and participatory approaches, incorporating learning from successful stakeholder interventions. We specialise in designing:

  • Programmes and projects
  • Models
  • Social enterprises and social business
  • Organisations
  • Institutions and networks

We use established design and planning frameworks like Results Based Management (RBM) and our own proprietary frameworks. Our work includes:

  • Theory of change
  • Log frame
  • Results assessment framework
  • Strategic plan
  • Business model
  • Business plan
  • Action plan
  • Road map
  • Costed plan
Redesigning midway during periods of crisis or unplanned change is also part of our design work. Some key examples of our work in this area:

National Drug Control Master Plan (NDCMP) for Government of Nigeria and UNODC, involving 37 Ministries and Departments

Design of India’s HIV Programme for Global Fund – Rounds 7,8,9,10
Design of the 3-fold model for smallholder farmers – for a three-fold increase in their incomes
Design of invest for wellness (i4we) primary healthcare model
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Enabling Specialists

Social Protection

An approach which has delivered over Rs 1500 crores & counting..

Social protection is a set of public measures that society provides for its members to protect them against economic and social distress caused by the absence or substantial reduction of income from work as a result of various contingencies ; the provision of health care; and the provision of benefits for families with children1.

Social protection reduces vulnerability, reduces inequity and gives a leg up to the poorest and most vulnerable.

At CMS, through the Universal Help Desk (UHD) for social protection we solve problems at every stakeholder level.

A UHD centre:

  • Bridges the gap between demand and supply of services

  • Increases awareness about schemes and programmes

  • Serves as a hub for referral linkages with other public and private service providers

  • Uses a technology platform to track applications and analyse data

Set up within a community organisation, NGO, a factory or any other location, UHD centres are local entities that are able to provide highly personalised and effective support to communities. The UHD centre is manned by a Help Desk Facilitator (HDF), a local, trained person. Various activities are conducted (depending on the community) to raise awareness and mobilise demand for UHD services. The centre adds value to the government by aggregating applications from communities and by helping the government achieve targets, gain recognition and relay modifications to social protection schemes to vulnerable communities.

By addressing the three main challenges to social protection – awareness, availability and ability – for both citizens and governments, the UHD initiative helps build bridges with communities and their leaders, while leveraging technology and relationships to solve pressing economic challenges.

What is our progress and success?

The Catalyst group has 27 years of social development experience. Swasti has worked and implemented several social protection projects with groups like sex workers, people living with HIV, factory workers and rural/urban women in various parts of the country. The journey began with UNDP, India-funded HIV-sensitive social protection model development and later on the Utkarsh Project and as part of the Avahan Project So far, we have facilitated a total of 177 UHDs covering 13 states & 1 UT, over a span of 10 years. We have mapped 2179 state schemes and central schemes, covering information on eligibility, scheme briefs, application details, and point person of contact. The economic benefits of our social protection initiatives amount to Rs. 276.21 crores in lives insured, Rs. 507.19 crores in benefits of schemes availed, and Rs. 1143.66 crores in the application of schemes.

Image: Women & TG in Tamil Nadu, India receiving social protection

Reach out to us to know more

1 (ILO Definition: ILO: World Labour Report: Income security and social protection in a changing world (Geneva, 2000) p. 29; ILO: Principles of Social Security (Geneva, 1998) p. 8)

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Enabling Specialists

Gender & Equity

Gender has been the cross-cutting theme of many of our research, review and evaluation studies in the areas of poverty, financial inclusion, social protection, livelihoods and governance.

We have adopted various gender frameworks, such as the World Bank’s agency opportunity framework and the women’s empowerment in agriculture index of IFPRI.

We contributed to developing an innovative reporting module on a mobile application that helps track the escalating experience of gender-based violence (GBV), focusing on the prevention and mitigation of violence.

We also quality assured the DOT tool developed for use in factories, where the workforce is often not literate. The DOT tool utilises a survey, using dots to capture responses about the work environment, where the colours of the dots indicate the level of action required to prevent GBV.

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Enabling Specialists

Behaviour Science

Our Behavioural Sciences services help clients build scientifically-informed programmes, with a commitment to influencing and sustaining lasting behaviour change.

Catalyst Behavioural Sciences services specialise in:

  • Empirical-evidence-based strategies that initiate the adoption of new/positive behaviour

  • Technical support – guided by deep analysis and involving research, insights and trends – to support the ground-level implementation

  • Innovative tools and skills to help communities drive transformation

Some of the key services include:

  • Assessments – Community immersion workshops, Audience segmentation & insights, Understanding of the ecosystem

  • Package design and implementation support – for gateway behaviour change, tools, processes and capacity building

Some of the tools we use:

  • Predictive Behaviour Tools, like survival analysis

  • Game-based data collection tool

  • Audience insights and segmentation tool

  • Behaviour insights survey

Some key examples of our work in this area:

  • Social Norms hub – In partnership with UNICEF, CMS runs/manages the Social Norms hub as the secretariat, which promotes Social and Behavioural Change Communication and social norms work through six key Indian Universities

  • Changing behaviours and saving lives & money – Avahan Programme: applied behavioural sciences in 130,000 cohorts, achieving extraordinary results.

  • How financial goal setting affects health behaviour (and risk perception) – a study in partnership with Houston University, USA

  • Nutrition: Comprehensive programmatic assessment of intervention to improve dietary diversity – studies across states and value chains to assess, enhance and improve the programme’s impact in partnership with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN)

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Enabling Specialists

Education

Our education portfolio is diverse, covering the right to education, education for livelihoods, education governance, ICT (Information, Communication, Technology) and innovations in education. We have worked across the entire cycle of learning, from early child-care, school education, supplementary and vocational training, life-skills education and workplace advancement.

We have conducted impact evaluations to provide evidence for decision-making on scale and for investment in education initiatives such as the Prajayatna and Nali Kali government projects in Karnataka, and Pratham-Vodafone’s ICT initiatives in urban and rural sites across their programme locations in India.

We anchored and supported the implementation of the Centre for Education (CEI) and Results for Development (R4D) in India. We have also evaluated several early childhood programmes. Through projects for Agastya and Pratham Books, we have assessed the curiosity of students for science and their association with story books.

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Enabling Specialists

TechTonic

TechTonic envisions technology as a force multiplier, problem solver, paradigm changer, and significant enabler of social impact. As a unit, our prime intention is to design, implement, or apply technology solutions in a way that works for all, especially the people from marginalised communities. Our expertise stems from our significant on-field experience, a multi-disciplinary team, and partnerships. TechTonic is product and company-agnostic, which allows it to seamlessly integrate with whatever is effective and functional.
TechTonic operates as the dedicated technology strategy division. The pivotal function fulfilled by TechTonic revolves around the creation and development of:
Technology architectures
Implementation strategies for impact programmes at scale

Our Approach

TechTonic uses a Business Process Improvement approach to increase the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the programme through the use of technology. Moving ahead, TechTonic will adopt a course of action focused on the following approaches:
TechTonic aims to work with partners to strengthen platforms that help improve the discovery of technology solutions within the sector. It ensures that all organisations have the resources and support they need to adopt solutions that improve the scale, impact, and sustainability of their respective programmes.
TechTonic intends to work with a network of partners to bridge the digital divide on the ground and ensure that critical digitally delivered services reach the vulnerable population.

Our Functions

To implement its strategies and blueprints, TechTonic works with a range of partners with tech development capabilities.
Internally, TechTonic also plays the role of a testing lab that assesses the capabilities of various solutions for the sector.

Our Work

TechTonic has worked on a diverse set of projects and programmes and has used technology as a lever to enable smooth operations and capture impact effectively.

Community Action Collab (previously #COVIDActionCollab)

Community Action Collab (CAC) is a spring-to-action humanitarian emergency platform that builds the resilience of Vulnerable People (VP) and their institutions. Started as #COVIDActionCollab, the group has successfully been able to demonstrate its capabilities by reaching 25 million services and 15 million VPs as part of the COVID response.
The TechTonic team worked with the technology partners of the collaborative to create a strong operational backbone that facilitated the provision as well as monitoring of the above-mentioned 25 million services. Most of the implementation operations were operationalised through an in-house-developed application called DICEflow, through which we were able to map out the number of services delivered to each person all across the country.

Social Protection

The Social Protection Programme is a Catalyst Group initiative that has been ongoing since 2019. It ensures that central and state government benefits reach eligible beneficiaries at the community level. The benefits are delivered through a help desk-facilitated model led by field-level workers.
TechTonic has helped create a model for operationalising the facilitation of social protection benefits to vulnerable populations on its in-house application, DICEflow. The solution designed for the social protection team involves streamlined workflows to ensure an up-to-date database of government schemes, assess eligibility for community members, verify document availability, and facilitate the scheme availing process. The solution allows geo-location tracking of where each community member is in their scheme application process. It also helps understand and generate insights into why certain community members were unable to avail themselves of a certain scheme.

Manyata: A Digitally Enabled Quality Improvement and Accreditation Journey for Small and Medium-Sized Private Nursing Homes

Manyata is a programme led by the Federation of Obstetric and Gynaecological Societies of India (FOGSI) and a global initiative for improving maternal health standards by a globally recognised pharmaceutical company. This programme spans 22 states, has been ongoing since 2013, and is now in its fourth phase.
For Manyata, TechTonic has been involved in creating the technology strategy and architecture of the project. The programme has envisioned a technology stack that allows various technology solutions to work together towards ensuring seamless delivery of the programme on the ground and an efficient data flow mechanism that enables strong governance.
We followed the below process towards making this happen:
Conduct a business process mapping and technology assessment of the entire Manyata system towards building an understanding of what is working, what is not working, and what it will take to make things work.
Create the technology architecture that would help the programme sustain itself at scale.
Create the technology strategy for taking the new Manyata technology stack to at least 1,000 Small and Medium-Sized private nursing homes.
Partner with various technology organisations to ensure that the intended design of the technology stack gets deployed. The Ecosystem partners involved in the project have been Dhwani Rural Information Systems, PharmAccess Foundation, Maternity Foundation, Aastrika, Together For Her (Avegen), and Nivi Inc.
Ensuring long-term sustainability by creating a modular architecture reduces the dependency on one system. It ensures that the strengths and reach of various partners working in the ecosystem are leveraged rather than sabotaged.

DICEflow

In 2018, we conceptualised and developed an Outreach-as-a-solution (OaaS) called DICEflow, a mobile and web solution that enables continuous and deeper community engagement. DICEflow has been instrumental in delivering key wellness and social protection-based benefits to the poor in Swasti’s Invest4Wellness (i4we) programme. Currently, DICEflow is also being used to facilitate vaccine eligibility and registration, screening of non-communicable diseases, and access to social protection schemes under the Community Action Collab initiative.

Please reach out to us at

[email protected]

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Bangalore – 560 094.
 

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About Us

Domain Areas

Transforming Investment

Our Initiatives

Enabling Specialists