February 2018 – Panagora launched a four-year Collaboration, Learning, and Adapting for Improved Health (CLAimHealth) activity in the Philippines. Our all-Filipino team has decades of experience in the local health sector, recognized expertise covering all CLA Activity requirements, and deep experience serving USAID. The team is led by Chief of Party Dr. Mary Ann Lansang, a seasoned manager, medical doctor, and accomplished researcher with more than three decades of experience.

USAID/Philippines’ Office of Health designed CLAimHealth to strengthen synergies across its diverse health activities and help optimize its Health Portfolio results by adapting interventions based on evidence. Panagora designed a participatory, integrated reflection and analysis approach to CLA to leverage learning insights at both the activity and full portfolio levels. To succeed, both aims require a strong culture of trust, open communication, and collaboration within and among USAID and implementing partners (IPs). The CLAimHealth team used its startup tasks, events and processes to elevate and launch this crucial relationship and trust building.

Panagora’s activity is based on the USAID/Philippines goals of eradicating and treating Tuberculosis and decreasing maternal and neonatal mortality, while also focusing on family planning to address country’s staggering growth rate—one of the highest in Southeast Asia. The most recent TB Prevalence Survey showed significantly higher prevalence than anticipated and projected, with the poorest quintile of Filipinos most affected. Women are having more children than intended and there is a high unmet need for modern family planning methods – again, most acute among the poorest, with high rates of adolescent pregnancy and neonatal issues.

At the same time, USAID/Philippines and the Office of Health (OH) have fully embraced USAID’s Evaluation Policy and CLA agenda and want to underpin their new Health Project and its many activities with cutting-edge CLA, performance monitoring, evaluation, and research services that can help ensure desired results are achieved.

Over four years, Panagora will establish a platform to support the OH as part of the CLAimHealth Activity. We will provide a range of monitoring, evaluation, and learning MEL services, recognizing that research and ME are tools; collaboration and learning are processes; and the end goal is adaptation based on evidence to maximize health outcomes.