Measuring and Assessing Capacity: A Landscape Review

Developed for the MOMENTUM suite of awards but highly applicable across the global health context, this landscape review aims to support efforts to introduce, deliver, scale up, and sustain high-quality maternal, newborn, and child health services through sound capacity measurement. It defines different levels and types of capacity relevant that can be measured; clarifies the distinction between capacity and performance; identifies key capacity measurement tool types and assessing their general suitability for capturing different capacities; and proposes promising approaches for capacity measurement, capacity indicators, and capacity measurement tool selection that reflect operational realities. Moving beyond capacity assessment tools, the landscape review takes a systems-thinking, complexity-aware monitoring lens to examine linkages between capacity and performance improvement, also tying in resilience capacity.