Health
Baseline, Midline & Endline — KOICA Maternal & Child Health Impact Evaluation (RCT)
- Client
- KOICA
- Funder
- KOICA
- Year
- c. 2021
- Location
- Selected districts across Ghana (KOICA MCH programme areas)
- Client type
- Development Partner
- Region(s)
- Multi-region
The assignment
KOICA's maternal and child health (MCH) programme sought to improve antenatal care uptake, skilled birth attendance, postnatal care, and child nutrition outcomes in selected districts of Ghana. KOICA required a gold-standard impact evaluation — a randomised controlled trial — to generate credible causal evidence of the programme's effectiveness. Devtplan Consult was engaged to lead the data collection across all three evaluation rounds (baseline, midline, endline), managing the research protocol, field teams, and data quality across treatment and control groups.
Our approach
Devtplan worked closely with KOICA and the evaluation design team to implement the pre-specified RCT protocol, which assigned districts to treatment and control conditions through a clustered randomisation. At each round, the team conducted a standardised household survey of pregnant women, mothers of under-five children, and household heads within the sampled clusters. Key outcome indicators — antenatal care visits, facility delivery, postnatal care utilisation, vaccination coverage, exclusive breastfeeding, and child anthropometric measurements — were collected using both self-report and direct measurement (height/weight boards, MUAC tape). All enumerators received specialist training in child anthropometric measurement protocols (WHO standards) and respectful, sensitive interviewing on reproductive health topics. A randomisation check was conducted at baseline to verify that treatment and control groups were comparable across key characteristics.
The outcome
Devtplan delivered clean baseline, midline, and endline datasets enabling the evaluation team to estimate the causal impact of the KOICA MCH programme with statistical rigour. The baseline confirmed comparability between treatment and control clusters on all pre-specified co-variates. Midline and endline analysis documented changes in key MCH indicators that informed KOICA's programme adaptation and scale-up decisions. The quality of the data and the fidelity of protocol implementation — confirmed by independent data-quality checks at each round — positioned this evaluation as a credible contribution to the evidence base on MCH interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Key figures
households surveyed per evaluation round (illustrative)
data collection rounds (baseline, midline, endline)
MCH outcome indicators tracked
Figures shown are illustrative for this demo.
"Executing a randomised controlled trial across multiple districts — maintaining protocol fidelity and data quality over three rounds — is the most demanding kind of field research. This is what it takes to generate evidence that actually changes policy."