India: ICDS Systems Strengthening & Nutrition Improvement Program (ISSNIP)

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The objective of Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) Systems Strengthening and Nutrition Improvement Program (ISSNIP) Project is to improve nutritional outcomes of children in India. There are four components to the project. The first component is ICDS institutional and systems strengthening. This component will support strategic interventions/improvements to enhance the effectiveness of the ICDS program. The second component is community mobilization and Behavior Change Communication (BCC). This component will strengthen the supply and demand-side interface of the ICDS program, especially at the point of delivery of nutrition services, and will rigorously monitor and evaluate this interface. The component will focus on excluded and marginalized groups. The development of a management model that emphasizes efficiency on the basis of mutual accountability between caregivers and beneficiaries will be a significant area of support. The third component is convergent nutrition action. This component will support the Government of India's efforts to initiate, and subsequently expand, a comprehensive convergent nutrition response to complement the ICDS, in order to address the multiple determinants of malnutrition. The fourth component is project management, monitoring and evaluation. This component will support effective project management including: (i) financing specialists in a variety of fields to strengthen the operation of the established Project Management Units (PMUs) at the central and state level. Support will also include financing of office equipment, renting of vehicles, travel costs for key program staff, participation in planning/review/dissemination workshops, participation in study tours and conferences in order to facilitate a cross fertilization of ideas and an assimilation in the program of nutrition related best practices, and incremental operating costs; (ii) financing administrative costs of a technical agency to provide required technical support for program implementation, including the cost of core teams at the central and state levels, their office expenses and travel costs for training and evaluations; and (iii) the monitoring and evaluation of project outcomes, including designing an independent impact evaluation study, carrying out a baseline survey as well as annual rapid assessments on program coverage and behavior change, quarterly internal assessments by ICDS supervisors in randomly selected Anganwadi Centers (AWCs), and social assessments and an ethnographic study in minority and hard to reach areas to assess service delivery and effectiveness of communication outreach. The component will also support evaluation of all project pilots and best practices and the dissemination of the findings.