ABSTRACT
Objectives: West Bengal - India's most densely populated state - is home to 8.3 million adolescent girls. Surveys indicate that 62 percent of adolescent girls were anemic, despite several sectoral programmes in place. To address this situation, the Government of West Bengal launched in 2012 Anemia Free West Bengal strategy convening all stakeholders, integrating flagship programmes and introducing new schemes as needed. Methods: Six sectoral Departments that were implementing programmes focusing on adolescent girls were brought together under the leadership of State Chief Minister to convergently deliver interventions that includes: 1) Food supplements fortified with nine essential micronutrients; 2) weekly iron and folic acid supplementation; 3) Biannual deworming; 4) A new conditional cash transfer scheme to promote secondary education and prevent child marriage; 5) A state-wide mass and mid-media communication campaign; and 6) Partnerships for social mobilization at community and household level. Programme convergence included formation of a state planning and monitoring committee, joint training of staff, pooling of resources as feasible, common reporting using standardized tools using dis-aggregation of reporting data by social group. Results: By mid-2013, all monthly inter-sectoral progress review meetings had been held as planned, three of the six departments had pooled budgets to support the strategy, and about 2 million adolescent girls were already receiving iron and folic acid supplementation weekly, deworming bi-annually, fortified food supplements, and/or cash transfers. Conclusions: The better practices from W. Bengal experience are critical know-hows on building political commitment and programme convergence on programming for adolescent girls through a common vision.