The Challenge of Evaluating Equity in Health: Experiences from India's Maternal Health Program.

This paper raises questions about the impacts of one of India's most ambitious cash conditional transfer programs, Janani Suraksha Yojana. It incorporates the perspectives of a practitioner working on maternal health issues and discusses the importance of considering alternative explanations as part of any patterns of observed results. It argues for exploring the impacts of interventions on the most vulnerable and marginalized as an essential aspect of an equity evaluation and for exploring impacts on inequities from a human rights lens. It also discusses some of the core competencies that might be needed for evaluations of equity initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]