Senegal Nutrition  Strengthening Operational Evaluation in Program implementation The objective of this proposal is to strengthen the use of operational evaluation to more quickly adjust interventions for greater impact and to adopt results based approaches to more quickly scale up successful interventions.  The proposed IDF is designed to finance 3 types of activities:  1) Operational research/evaluation; 2) strengthening the capacity at various levels to report in real time on the condition of mothers and children in each of the communities, and 3) to accelerate implementation and scale up of successful interventions based on the results of the operations research and community assessments. 1.   Operational research/evaluation is designed to answer questions related to the effectiveness and efficiency of various interventions.  Given that within each community a number of interventions are taking place simultaneously, one of the purposes of this research or evaluation is to answer questions related a.   Which combination of interventions is having the greatest impact? b.   What is the value added of breast feeding exclusively for the first six months, relative to other interventions? c.   How effective is the cash transfer program being considered to those chronically malnourished? d.   What type of intervention would be best in a particular community given their nutritional status?  More vitamin fortification or iodized salt, or mosquito bed nets? e.   What are the most cost effective interventions given specific conditions? 2.   Strengthening the capacity at the community and regional level to report on and take action based on regular assessments of their communities' nutritional status. a.   Regular standardized reports on the health and nutritional status of mothers and children in each community. b.   The ability to generate a minimal level of analysis at the community level to allow program leaders to take corrective action immediately:  inventories of certain medications are low or out, the "relais" are not showing up on time or at all, spot checking the proper use of bed nets by mothers and children, etc. c.   An effort to simplify and standardized the M&E system being generated by the community level and to disseminate this information systematically to regional and national authorities.  This will allow program leaders to zero in on successful (or non-responsive) interventions and better understand why things are working or not. 3.   Strengthen program implementation in new communities and/or of different interventions in existing communities.  The idea is to systematically integrate the results of the operational research and community assessments into action. a.   Train regional community program leaders on results based management b.   Identify and train "coaches" to serve as training of trainers to support program leaders in strengthening their leadership and management skills c.   Train program leaders to design implementation approaches that engage in learning and discovery of various types of intervention to ascertain their feasibility, scaling up potential, and cost effectiveness. The above approach builds on a strong Monitoring and Evaluation system and is designed to take it to the next level of real time analysis and rapid implementation.  The PRN has an effective, lean information system from data collected monthly at the community level, which provides information on project activities, outcome indicators, and costs. This activity will continue to form the basis of SNEP's monitoring system while being adapted and improved according to strategic changes and needs. Emphasizing the importance of outcome-based monitoring, the project requires that implementing organizations conduct Knowledge, Practices and Coverage (KPC) surveys using standardized tools, sampling and data collection methods. These KPC surveys will be conducted at the beginning and end of a subproject. This information is analyzed and interpreted in relation to relevant national surveys, notably the DHS and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys. Active involvement of stakeholders will be important to create ownership of the information. Therefore, community management committees periodically will discuss monthly results presented by community workers. The development objective of this grant is to: (i) strengthen two weak links in the M&E system of the PRN, namely operational research and community analysis [the current M&E system of the Programme de Renforcement de la Nutrition, Nutrition Strengthening Program (PRN)] essentially geared towards the monitoring of results of activities in the project sites but generates little important information for the documentation of best practices); and (ii) promote leadership and management capacity of actors in the PRN.