An effort to ensure easy access to high quality family planning services has been a centerpiece of USAID's population program since its inception. In the early 90s, USAID launched the Maximizing Access and Quality (MAQ) initiative to work systematically in this area. Since that time, remarkable progress has been made in producing evidence-based guidance documents and promoting the dissemination of best practices in family planning and reproductive health.
Several years ago, with input from many of its cooperating agencies, USAID developed a 3- to 4-day workshop called the MAQ Exchange that could be conducted with USAID missions and other key reproductive health stakeholders around the world to facilitate the exchange of MAQ principles and evidence-based best practices. Over the years, the MAQ Exchange has been conducted in Romania, Tanzania, Ghana, Guatemala, Nigeria, Honduras, and most recently, in Haiti. The MAQ Exchange curriculum has grown to include nearly 20 family planning and selected reproductive health topics.
As the MAQ initiative continues to develop, new strategies for implementing best practices at the service delivery level have emerged. One of the newest topics introduced into the MAQ Exchange is
Transfer of Learning, an approach that employs a number of learning strategies to ensure that knowledge and skills acquired during a learning intervention (e.g., best practices learned during a MAQ Exchange) are applied on the job. The Transfer of Learning module and the accompanying Transfer of Learning guide provide very specific guidance to supervisors, trainers, learners, co-workers and others on what each of these groups can do before, during, and after a learning event to increase the likelihood that learning will actually be applied in the service delivery setting.