Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Communication Programs (CCP) has been awarded a five-year, $40 million global health project from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to strengthen knowledge and information use and exchange among health program managers and service providers, particularly in family planning and reproductive health. CCP has held an iteration of this project continuously since 1978.

The project – called Knowledge for Health-II – builds on the successful Knowledge for Health (K4Health) project and all of its predecessors. It will facilitate knowledge and information use and exchange among key health program managers and service providers using a new paradigm it calls social knowledge management.

“Knowledge has the power to save lives,” said Michael J. Klag, MD, MPH, the dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We will be giving health care service providers and program managers on-demand access to an immense body of critical knowledge. It is truly a global health learning revolution.”

USAID sought a partner to accelerate the use and exchange of knowledge in an increasingly interconnected world. In addition to CCP, the K4Health team includes Management Sciences for Health, FHI360, and IntraHealth.

“We are deeply committed to strengthening the capacity of our country partners, and at the core of capacity is knowledge,” said Susan Krenn, Director of CCP. “Now we have the opportunity to push the envelope in knowledge management and recognize the fundamental role of people in KM”.

The U.S. Agency for International Development administers the U.S. foreign assistance program providing economic and humanitarian assistance in more than 80 countries worldwide.

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communication Programs is a global leader in the field of strategic health communication and knowledge management with active programs in more than 30 countries worldwide as well as in the U.S. It is part of the School’s Department of Health, Behavior and Society.