Norway and India share a common vision and stand committed to fostering collaborative efforts to solve priority health issues. In 2006, the two democracies started a health initiative called Norway-India Partnership Initiative (NIPI) with a vision for providing strategic, catalytic, and innovative support to India’s National Health Mission.
During the past 17 years of its implementation, NIPI has envisaged a unique model of development cooperation and an efficient mechanism of testing our ‘innovative ideas in public health settings’. NIPI has demonstrated the importance of aligning with national priorities, and leveraging local expertise through a strong governance framework at the national and state levels using the health system approach.
With the view to further strengthen the relationship between our two countries, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India agreed to extend the cooperation with a Phase IV of NIPI.
As a first step, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed on 1st July 2024 by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), the Government of India, the Government of Norway and the supported states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Jammu & Kashmir.
Impact
- Scaling up innovations: NIPI’s work over 10 years of designing, pilot testing and demonstration of innovations, has created a mechanism for innovation testing and scale-up. 10 out of 11 innovations of NIPI were scaled up by Government of India
- Support to State Health Societies for strengthening various health programs of National Health Mission:
a. Home Based New-Born Care (HBNC)
b. Special New Born Care Units (SNCUs) and SNCU online system
c. Family Participatory Care for newborns
d. Pre-service Nursing Education
e. Rashtriya Bal Swasthya Karyakram (RBSK) and pediatric care services
f. Capacity building through Dakshata - Collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India: Development of over 25 policy documents, guidelines, and training manuals; Covered more than 700,000 newborn & infants and over 5,000 mothers; trained over 40,000 health functionaries.
- Sustainable mechanism of innovations: For every Norwegian Kroner (NOK) invested by NIPI, the Government of India invested NOK 19.50 from the state health funds for NIPI innovations
Objectives
- Innovate: Demonstrate innovative approaches for Health System Strengthening in Sexual, Reproductive, New-born, Child and Adolescent health
- Replicate & Scale: Provide technical assistance in scale up of NIPI and NHM demonstrated innovative practices in RMNCAH and to ensure institutionalisation of state innovation hubs
- Collaborate: Foster institutional collaborations on Digital Public Health Goods in RMNCAH
