MSF Innovation Newsletter July 2021 – Community Involvement
Women fetching water at a water point in the informal settlement of Stoneridge in Southern Harare. MSF drilled the solar-powered borehole and trained the local community health club, who is now maintaining the site.Why MSF Innovators are focused on community engagement
Every day over the past five years, an average of 640,000 people went online for the first time. Improved internet access globally has accelerated a rapid and vast adoption of social media, providing humanitarian organizations like MSF new opportunities to reach and communicate with local communities online. Working closely with local leaders and community members – online and offline – is essential for MSF teams across the movement to understand local contexts and people in different areas’ perceptions of health and disease in their community.
Many MSF programmes and projects focus on enhancing community engagement and involvement. One example is the 2-year Patient Multimedia Engagement (PME) project which wrapped up in June 2021. The project, led by Anne Jensen, funded by TIC, and supported by SIU, explored how MSF operatics can interact with communities through digital and social media. A recent article on the SIU website summarises the project's findings and outcomes, including a practical hands-on toolkit (currently only available inside the MSF movement).
Inclusive community engagement was a central topic of discussion during this year's Scientific Days. In her introduction to the first session of the event, Kamalini Lokuge, Lead, Humanitarian Health Research Initiative, Australian National University, emphasized the importance of community partnerships in combating COVID-19. Worldwide, the success of everything from contact tracing to local social distancing restrictions has depended on the acceptance and active support of local populations. Other sessions echoed the need for embedding community engagement in MSF operations.
Beyond programmes and projects focused on tangible actions, transferring ownership to local communities can help spur attitudinal change that leads to positive behaviour change, such as the adoption of new clean energy solutions. Energy transition is a critical component in MSF’s broader planetary health development. SIU has caught up with Iñaki Goicolea, Energy & HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) Team Leader at MSF Operational Center Brussels (OCB), to get his insights into how innovation and local partnerships can boost uptake of new energy systems and solutions.
As always, this edition of the MSF Innovation Newsletter is packed with updates on ongoing Innovation Cases and recent planetary health and health innovation content highlights from inside and outside the MSF Movement.
We hope you enjoy the read!
Innovation Highlights from the MSF Movement
Non-Communicable Disease Patient Support App – New SIU Case
Current Status & Why it Matters: In early 2021 OCG and SIU joined forces to launch an investigation into the feasibility of a patient support application for Diabetic and Hypertensive patients. It is currently estimated that 80 percent of annual mortality related to non-communicable disease (NCD) occurs in low- and middle-income countries. NCD care has increased in priority for MSF as global demand has grown in recent years. Digital support approaches have been experimented with in many high-income contexts, however, to date very little evidence exists in relation to digital patient support applications in low-resource and humanitarian contexts.
What's Next: The needs assessment for this case is projected to be completed by August 2021 leading to the next phase of testing with MSF project teams and NCD patients. A key element of this needs assessment is the 30 interviews with patients. Undoubtedly these insights will allow MSF to validate a new digitally-enabled NCD approach within an upgraded operational system.
Learn more about the NCD Patient Support App Case here »
MSF Listen – Targeting Mis- and Disinformation
Current Status & Why it Matters: How can MSF address misinformation and disinformation in a time where it seems to be spreading like wildfire? MSF Listen is an initiative, supported by the MSF Transformational Investment Capacity (TIC), that challenges us to prioritise understanding over judgement to effectively address community health needs. This effort is based around a platform that can help field teams to monitor, analyse, verify and respond to misinformation and rumours. The platform is currently being piloted in Somalia and Afghanistan.
What's Next: With the pilot projects currently running, the MSF Listen team aims to validate and refine a process that can be deployed across the MSF Movement. Through the scaleup of the MSF Listen platform and facilitation of other supportive structures to listen and respond to communities it is hoped that this can contribute to reduction of the negative impact of health related misinformation and ultimately improve outcomes overtime.
Learn more about MSF Listen on the Sharepoint case page or by watching this 2-minute video.
External Resource Highlight
WHO Publication: Community engagement: a health promotion guide for universal health coverage in the hands of the people
WHO has defined community engagement as “a process of developing relationships that enable stakeholders to work together to address health-related issues and promote well-being to achieve positive health impact and outcomes”.
In this 30-page guide, WHO:
Discuss the many undeniable benefits of community engagement and look closer at different engagement principles and enabling factors.
Introduce four approaches to community engagement:
Community-oriented
Community-based
Community-managed
Community-owned
Provide an overview of the different levels, depths and breadths of community engagement and discuss how they determine the type and degree of involvement of the people.
The guide is intended for change agents involved in community work at the level of communities and healthy settings.
Download the guide here »
Further reading recommendations:
FAO, Agrinatura, and the European Commission have developed the Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovations Systems project, which uses a community-based participatory approach to promote co-creation and sharing of knowledge. The project aims to equip smallholder farmers with the 'soft skills' necessary for change.
MSF's Story of Change pilot evaluated a participatory, bottom-up approach to health promotion and education to share knowledge about Noma, a gangrenous infection, in communities around the Sokoto Children’s Hospital in northwest Nigeria.
Nyss is a custom software platform for community-based surveillance (CBS), developed by Norwegian Red Cross, in cooperation with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and Belgium Red Cross.
What We're Listening To
The Energy Gang
Tracking the Equity Outcome of Decarbonization
In this episode, guest co-host Dr. Destenie Nock, Ass. Prof. of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, discusses how we can measure the equity outcomes of energy transition. She emphasizes her strive to be an engineer that never loses track of people’s problems and presents her work creating new models for energy-systems planning that factor in positive social objectives, not just cost or reliability metrics. Listen here »
Casual Inference
Community Engagement, Health Disparities, and Measure Development with Melody Goodman
In this episode, co-hosts Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan discuss community engagement, health disparities, and measure development with Dr. Melody Goodman from New York University Global School of Public Health. They ponder the difficulties of measuring the performance of community engagement activities and explore how a gold standard measure for community engagement could look like. Listen here »
Until Next Time 👋
As always we would love to hear of any global health innovation insights or thoughts. Anything you would like to feature in the next newsletter? Reach out with any questions or comments on siu@stockholm.msf.org or simply reply to this email - we'd be delighted to continue the conversation!
Have a restful weekend,
The MSF Sweden Innovation Unit Team & MSF Innovation Movement