Clean Cities, Blue Oceans
Clean Cities, Blue Oceans is USAID’s global flagship program for combatting ocean plastics. Clean Cities, Blue Oceans (CCBO) enhances solid waste solutions and recycling systems; promotes social and behavior change for sustainable reduce, reuse, and recycle (3Rs) practices; improves governance; and forges strategic partnerships with the private sector. CCBO, led by Tetra Tech, addresses ocean plastics pollution, and focuses on reducing ocean plastics directly at their source in cities and towns across Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The objectives of CCBO are backed by growing public awareness, societal concern, and public and private sector mobilization around the prevalence of plastic waste within the world’s oceans and coastal ecosystems. TMG leads strategy design and implementation oversight of activities to promote social and behavior change for sustainable reduce, reuse, and recycle (3Rs) practices, aiming to move the field forward from an information only approach to one that enables change. TMG also leads gender inclusion, including developing new US government Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP)-funded activities.
USAID Advancing Nutrition
The Manoff Group is a partner on the JSI-led consortium for this USAID flagship multi-sectoral nutrition project. USAID Advancing Nutrition provides technical support to and implementation of nutrition interventions for USAID and its partners to address the root causes of malnutrition. TMG’s cross-cutting work facilitates multi-sectoral integration. We bring expertise in social and behavior change and communication, as well as in capacity building for government partners in evidence-based design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation to change behaviors and improve health outcomes. TMG staff lead and support large-scale coordination efforts such as the global food systems conceptual framework development, the first New Partners Initiative (NPI) for nutrition in Burkina Faso and Kenya, and coordination around the continuum of care for acute malnutrition in DRC. We lead and provide support on multiple SBC efforts that strengthen the capacity of implementers to address factors that increase demand and use of high-quality services and home practices. TMG staff on the project support the USAID Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance to improve the quality of nutrition SBC and strengthen SBC capacity in partners with guidance and tools. And TMG is advancing the quality and impact of nutrition SBC by developing tools and conducting reviews of social norms in complementary feeding and maternal nutrition, and defining appropriate measures of consumer demand for healthy diets. We are developing a guide that adapts and tailors marketing techniques (both commercial and social marketing) for USAID activities that are generating demand for healthy diets among low-income consumers.
MOMENTUM Country and Global Leadership
Working with the Jhpiego-led consortium, TMG is leading MOMENTUM Country and Global Leadership efforts in SBC. This work is focused on supporting the project’s efforts to take a systems approach to SBC, promoting behaviors as an organizational framework for the design of strategies to improve maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health. This work includes leading efforts across all technical areas on the project to identify areas of slow progress requiring a new approach and then enabling the practice of priority behaviors to address that challenge. In the first years of the project, TMG has helped the project analyze and address key challenges in areas ranging from professional development for healthcare workers, to antenatal and post-natal care for mother and baby, to better institutionalizing post-abortion family planning within broader service initiatives and re-conceptualizing self-care beyond reproductive health in the context of COVID, to extracting global lessons and pathways from successful work on facilitating couples communication. TMG is also supporting project efforts to build the commitment and capacity among host-country partners to incorporate behavior-driven strategic thinking into health sector planning, implementation and monitoring. Country buy-in efforts in Ghana, Sierra Leone, Indonesia and Nigeria to address entrenched obstacles in the delivery of quality MNCH/FP/RH services, to prevent intimate partner violence and child or early forced marriage, and integrating gender considerations into WASH behavior change programming have also begun.
MOMENTUM Routine Immunization Transformation and Equity
TMG joined the JSI Research & Training Institute-led consortium to support MOMENTUM Routine Immunization Transformation and Equity. The project is tasked with collaborating with local partners to sustainably strengthen routine immunization programs to overcome the entrenched obstacles contributing to stagnating and declining immunization rates in USAID-supported countries, and to address the barriers to reaching zero-dose and under-immunized children with life-saving vaccines and other health services. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the disruption of immunization services, MOMENTUM Routine Immunization Transformation and Equity will also support countries with the maintenance, adaptation, and/or reinstatement of immunization services and the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines. TMG staff work to sustainably improve the immunization service experience by improving health worker performance and leadership (including “people skills”), adaptive management capability, and use of information to strengthen decision-making and introduce actions to reduce obstacles to equity. TMG is also supporting a series of online sessions to gather input from communities, caregivers, and frontline health workers on what they view as key barriers to reaching zero-dose and under-vaccinated children and potential solutions for addressing them, including in urban, rural remote, and fragile settings.