Athena Infonomics conducted an evaluation of the Swabhimaan Programme, a package of community-led interventions—implemented by women-led self-help groups (SHGs) and supported by the UNICEF India Country Office and India's National Rural Livelihood Mission—that aims to improve the nutrition status of adolescent girls and women in three Indian states: Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha.

The objective of this evaluation was to: gain an understanding of the quality of the Swabhimaan Programme's implementation; assess its relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability; and identify the critical and feasible guidelines for scale-up in other areas. This was a theory-based evaluation that combined the use of Contribution Analysis and the Most Significant Change approaches to explore UNICEF India's contribution to the achievement of the programme's results and capture the unexpected changes and indirect/process outcomes that are often not recorded by indicator-based evaluations through document review and qualitative interviews.

Conclusions and recommendations based on the findings of the evaluation will be used to inform government scale-up strategy in other blocks/districts and provide critical learnings for the effective implementation of the programme at scale, including monitoring and feedback mechanisms.

For more information or any questions on this evaluation, please contact Francis Xavier Rathinam at francis.r@athenainfonomics.com.

‍Image Source: Suchit Nanda / Majority World