The Jeevika Multisectoral Convergence Pilot in Bihar : A Process Evaluation Report

The impact evaluation of a program primarily answers the question of what impacts (if any) did a program have on the outcomes of interest, while a process evaluation (PE) answers the questions of how and why a program did or did not have that impact. Therefore, a PE forms an important component of an overall evaluation plan, and it is critical to opening the ‘black box’ of programs and illuminating the processes by which programs achieve their impact, or not [1–5]. A PE should be theory-driven [6], to enable all stakeholders in an evaluation to understand what aspects of program implementation or utilization were instrumental to program success or failure. A PE is particularly important to implement with rigor in evaluations of complex interventions [4,7,8]. Examples of rigorous PEs in the field of nutrition are few, 9-15, but there have been many recent calls for more attention to process-oriented research that can help shed light on how nutrition interventions can be operationalized effectively to achieve desired outcomes, 16-18. The challenges inherent in this type of evaluation are also well-understood, but here again, the science is evolving with methods that are particularly suited to illuminating pathways through which efforts to deliver nutrition interventions achieve their impact. This document, therefore, lays out the objectives, approach, and methods to be used for the PE in the JEEViKA-Multisectoral Convergence (JEEViKA-MC) pilot, and presents the results of the PE that was conducted from April to June 2017.