India has one quarter of the world’s maternal deaths and one quarter of the world’s children’s deaths. Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand states have especially high rates for maternal and child mortality. In addition, chronic malnutrition affects almost half of the children in India.

The Vistaar project supports the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) by providing critical technical assistance in maternal child health. By working to strengthen the capacity of the National Rural Health Mission implementation by the Government of India and the state Governments of Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh, the project aims at improving maternal, newborn and child health and nutritional status including achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.

The key activities to be undertaken are:

• Facilitating evidence reviews of maternal child health interventions or pilot efforts, which will be conducted by recognized public and private sector experts;
• Based on the recommendations from these expert reviews, supporting demonstration and learning projects (action research) to fill critical knowledge gaps in that theme area;
• Promotion of recommended models for adoption within NRHM; and
• Capacity building to support the adoption of the recommended models at scale.

These activities will be conducted for selected technical themes including:

• Growth promotion and complementary feeding;
• Anemia prevention and treatment;
• Newborn care and skilled birth attendance;
• Delay of marriage and first birth;
• Performance improvement and support to community health functionaries; and
• Village health planning and monitoring.

Important cross cutting themes for the project will be knowledge generation and sharing, facilitating collaboration and convergence and promoting interventions with a strong equity focus, including gender equity.