The GFF collaborates with the Countdown to 2030 initiative (Countdown) to strengthen our assessment of progress on women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health in GFF priority countries by producing an annual progress report for portfolio-wide review, and, importantly, through country-specific collaborations.  

The 2023 progress report focuses upon select health impact and intervention coverage indicators from the GFF results framework. The analysis is primarily based on global estimates and the most recent available household surveys and covers the topic areas of maternal and newborn health, child health and nutrition, and adolescent fertility and family planning.

For more information about Countdown’s global monitoring work click here.

GFF also partners with Countdown on country collaborations aimed at generating evidence and strengthening country capacity to measure progress and performance of RMNCAH-N programs (More information on the country collaborations is available here). A key focus of the collaborations is to inform annual and mid-term reviews of countries’ 5-year national health plans and GFF investment cases.

Currently the country collaborations support 29 GFF partner countries in Africa and South Asia . Country collaborations involve national academic and public health institutions working closely with ministries of health and national statistical offices. Technical assistance is provided by Countdown academic and United Nations partners as well as by GFF staff.

Workshops

A flagship event for the Countdown country collaborations are annual meetings, multi-country workshops whic support country teams in generating a robust progress report on women’s, children’s, and adolescents’ health that can inform national review processes. Previous workshops were held in 2022 in Nairobi, in 2023 in Dakar and in 2024 in Kigali.

Specific workshop objectives are to:

1. Support country analysts to prepare a clean dataset and produce a set of national and subnational estimates for key RMNCAH-N indicators, including gender and equity.
2. Strengthen skills of the country teams in the analysis of health facility and related national and subnational data.
3. Support each country to prepare posters summarizing the most interesting findings from the analysis plus a first draft of a country report on progress on RMNCAH-N.
4. Present additional methods and tools the country teams can use to finalize their country reports or for other analyses on RMNCAH-N.
5. Discuss opportunities for the country teams to disseminate their findings through national fora.

Each country team finalizes their progress report after the workshop and prepares other related products for dissemination through country convenings and events.

Country-specific analysis results from the 2024 annual meeting reviewed here.

To learn more, watch the video on the Countdown multi-country workshops here.

Chartbook

Select country to download the chartbook

Multi-country studies

In addition to the annual meetings, Countdown leads multi-country studies to conduct in-depth analysis of a specific topic. As with the annual meetings, the multi-country studies engage members of the country collaboration teams through remote and in-person collaboration culminating in country-level information products as well as cross-cutting analysis. Previous and current multi-country study topics include covid-19, family planning, immunization, maternal newborn health, and urban health.