Day 8: PSI

On Wednesday, we were hosted by staff at PSI India in their New Delhi office for a presentation on the second phase of their Women's Health Project. After meeting with community-based and national organizations, it was quite a different experience to meet with the country office of a large, world renowned NGO. Below are some of the highlights and takeaways from our time with PSI:

• Just because you're big, doesn't mean you're clunky! It's easy to assume that large organizations, with their inevitable bureaucracy and heft, can't be effective at the community level. PSI's Women's Health Project dispels this myth effectively. In the first photo below, a PSI staffer is describing the map of the New Seema Puri neighborhood, divided into blocks and with important landmarks identified. In the second photo, you see an extremely detailed and comprehensive household survey that PSI's community health workers use to plan and record their marketing and outreach (photo credit to Meagan Smith on photo 2). PSI proved that with the right models and a motivated staff, large international NGOs can be nimble and operate effectively at the community level.

• Effective social marketing promotes a cohesive, unified message at every level of communications. In the office, PSI staff showed us a tv commercial for the Freedom 5 IUD that centers around a"lock and key" metaphor. Later, we saw how this metaphor was also used in one-to-one interactions between community health workers and IUD candidates in New Seema Puri (photo credit to EOPhile). Note that in the BCC materials below, the IUD acts as the "lock" on the door.

• A woman's choice about family planning involves a whole lot of people. PSI is keenly aware that women are influenced by a whole set of actors that affect her access to contraception. At home, husbands, mother-in-laws and sister-in-laws can apply pressure for women to have more children. In the community, health workers, doctors and pharmacists provide a continuum of information and service provision. For such a personal decision, I was surprised to learn about the myriad of people who affect women's decision-making and access!
• To satisfy your mission, it's important to diversify funding. The Women's Health Project, which promotes IUDs as well as safe abortion kits, was funded by anonymous (and I'm assuming very generous) donor. While the project appears effective and well-run, and meets PSI's organizational objectives, it would never have been funded by USAID do to that agency's restrictions on support for abortions. With diversified funding, PSI is able to implement activities in a mission critical area that may not have been possible if it were entirely dependent upon USAID.

Our day with PSI was exciting and intellectually satisfying. It was clear that the program was based on a solid logical framework, which itself was based upon data from dependable sources like India's National Family Health Survey. With donor's increased emphasis on evidence-based programming, it seems that PSI is well positioned!