Knowledge SUCCESS: Learn more. Share more. Do More.

Knowledge SUCCESS:
Learn More. Share More. Do More.

For more than 40 years, the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs has led USAID’s flagship knowledge management projects for family planning and reproductive health. The most recent iteration of the work, Knowledge SUCCESS, which began in February 2019, was terminated by USAID as the result of massive funding cuts made by the Trump Administration this spring.

As the project closes its doors, CCP’s PR & Communications Director, Stephanie Desmon, sat down with Tara Sullivan and Sara Mazursky, the director and deputy director of Knowledge SUCCESS, respectively. They discussed the history of CCP’s knowledge management work, which dates to 1978 and the Population Information Program (before CCP was officially a center) what has been accomplished and what still needs to be done.

The interview is condensed and edited for clarity.

Stephanie Desmon: Tara, not everyone may be familiar with Knowledge SUCCESS. What was it and what were you trying to accomplish?

Tara Sullivan: Knowledge SUCCESS was our USAID-funded, global knowledge management project. Our goals were to make family planning knowledge easy to share and easy to use in order to improve quality of care, strengthen health systems, and ultimately, improve health outcomes. Ultimately, we reached 1.4 million people with high-quality family planning and reproductive health information, led more than 250 knowledge management trainings and bridged the gap between knowledge and action in global health programs in primarily low- and middle-income countries with our Global Health: Science and Practice journal.

1.4 million

people reached through websites

250

knowledge management trainings

1.5 million

Global Health: Science and Practice journal articles accessed per year

600,000

online visits to Family Planning Handbook per year

By integrating knowledge management into regional and country family planning programs, the project helped improve coordination and ensured improved use of evidence and expertise and the creation of knowledge that aligns with the needs and priorities of regional and country family planning programs.

Initiatives such as Learning Circles created spaces for family planning practitioners to connect, share experiences, and co-develop solutions. For example, a Learning Circle focusing on adolescent and youth reproductive health brought together stakeholders from multiple countries to discuss what works—and what doesn’t—leading to the adaptation of successful strategies across regions.

Desmon: CCP had been awarded the next iteration of the USAID knowledge management project, which was to be called Knowledge SUCCESS II. It was to be worth $50 million over five years and it was designed to continue the work that CCP and its partners have done in knowledge management. That, of course, ended when USAID terminated nearly all projects. What is left to be done in knowledge management, Sara? What was Knowledge SUCCESS II going to look like?

Sara Mazursky: We were going to place an increased emphasis on locally led and locally driven knowledge management solutions. We planned to create regional knowledge management centers of excellence, where the knowledge management experts based within those regions would be key resources for others looking to build their capacity in knowledge management and learn new skills. We were committed to creating a more formal structure to engage with existing knowledge management expertise within the region and work through them to grow and train the next generation of knowledge management leaders.

We were also going to be working with some new partners – a youth-led partner and inclusion partners. We knew that there were still areas within the equity space where CCP was not best placed to lead, and so we were bringing on partners who were experts, similar to what we had done related to equity in Knowledge SUCCESS.

Desmon: What do you think the biggest accomplishment of the project was?

Mazursky: This is the fourth iteration of USAID’s global knowledge management project. And this is the first time that we had knowledge management officers, and a team, based in countries of implementation, hearing directly from audiences on what they need and proposing ways in which to fill knowledge gaps, and then leading the implementation of those solutions. In the past, it had been more top-down in that we would share global level guidance with audiences in countries of implementation. I think everybody should feel good about that shift in how we were centered, because it wasn’t always easy and involved advocating that a tailored regional approach would work, but it was always the right thing to do, and we stuck to it.

Desmon: What role does knowledge management play across the field of global health development?

Sullivan: First, I would say I think that knowledge management has an undervalued but very important role. Sara and I teach a course at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health all about why knowledge management is so important. In terms of global health and development, I would say it’s the glue that brings systems together. It helps to make sure that we’re utilizing all the resources and all the knowledge that there is to bear for a specific area, whether it be family planning, HIV/AIDS, etc. f

" ... it's the glue that brings systems together."

What we have found is that while many people practice knowledge management, they do it in an ad hoc manner. One key piece of successful knowledge management programs is being systematic about your knowledge management. It’s making sure that when we have a practitioner in the field, they have the right information in the right format at the right time.

And once you have that systematic knowledge management in place, you can have the evidence, the experience, the expertise to ensure quality of care. If you have quality of care, you’re going to have better health outcomes. If you have better health outcomes, you’re going to have a healthier population. So, we see knowledge management as being a crucial set of interventions that complement other public health interventions.

Desmon: Tara, you said knowledge management is undervalued. Do you think that maybe its role in global health and development is not fully understood?

Sullivan: I don’t think people realize that if you don’t do knowledge management well, your projects are not going to have the kind of impact that you would like. And if knowledge management is not there, you can feel it.

Desmon: What does it look like when it’s not there? What is the problem that knowledge management solves?

Sullivan: The problem that knowledge management solves is that it can connect people to each other, it can help us to be more efficient and more effective. And oftentimes, when I talk about knowledge management, I will say, it’s a global health imperative. And the reason I use that language, which can sound a little strong, is that we know, and now more than ever, that resources are finite. If you’re not practicing knowledge management, you’re not optimizing your resources efficiently and effectively in your other programming.

Mazursky: I wanted to add, picking up what Tara just said, the critical aspect of sharing. There’s the codifying and the processes and everything like that, but it’s also sharing what you have learned with the community and providing access to those tools and resources so that you’re not recreating the wheel. I would argue every project does knowledge management, but not systematically. So there’s a whole plethora of resources out there that people just don’t know about.

I think the systematic way that we go about knowledge management has helped us get the right voices heard and the right people in the room to solve those challenges.

Desmon: What do you mean by the right people?

Mazursky: Often in our industry, it’s the same people who are at the table making the decisions. But they’re not necessarily the people who are most impacted by the challenges. One example is through our Learning Circles, where we bring together a cadre of people who are working in a specific topic area related to family planning and reproductive health. It’s not always the most senior person who is coming into those cohorts. We try to make sure there’s a gender balance. We take into consideration different abilities, whether that’s language abilities, etc., and place them as the experts in that conversation. It shouldn’t be novel, but at the scale and degree we did it through Knowledge SUCCESS, it was.

Learning Circles

Fostering people-centered, peer-to-peer learning

Established in 2021, Learning Circles are a set of informal group dialogues meant to develop ideas for addressing common program implementation issues by bringing together small groups of up to 30 people from the same region, so that shared experiences are more relevant to everyone’s context. In Learning Circles, we’re interested in highlighting practical knowledge and experience gained from implementing programs on a daily basis. In Learning Circles, participants are the experts.

Implementing and scaling up the integration of community health workers into health systems
Institutionalization of adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health programs in East and West Africa
Self-care interventions for advancing family planning and reproductive health in Senegal
Domestic resource mobilization for family planning in Asia
Emergency preparedness and response in family planning and sexual and reproductive health programs in East Africa

Sullivan: As Sara was saying, a big part of knowledge management is that knowledge sharing aspect. But what about making sure people use it? How do you put this thing out there in the world, whether it’s by a website or a conversation around a particular topic, and make sure it is used by the people who need it?

There’s a huge gap in the world between the evidence and how long it takes to get into practice. It can take years. So, if we are not sharing these best practices and information to as many people as we can, everybody’s losing. If people are not using the latest evidence, that’s not going to bring about the best health outcomes for the population. Our job is to get that information out there, shared, contextualized and used.

It’s not a one size fits all approach, which is why we organize our knowledge management approaches around how people may be best suited to receiving the information, so it’ll get put into practice.

Desmon: Since there will not be a fifth iteration of the knowledge management project, at least for the time being, what does the community lose without this focus on knowledge management and family planning?

Sullivan: We’re losing all of the efforts of the last decade. Things are not easy to find. Things are not easy to share. And it’s impossible to use it if you can’t find and share it.

Mazursky: I 100 percent agree with what Tara said, but I think what we don’t lose is people’s investment in using knowledge management. Over the last 15 years, we’ve built global capacity in knowledge management. There’s buy in for it and for using a systematic approach, and there’s more acceptance of what knowledge management is and how important it is within institutions and among individuals.

People are now scrambling to make sure that we’re able to keep some of these online portals that codify people’s knowledge because people acknowledge the importance of knowledge management. We have lost the ability to facilitate a lot of that, but it’s heartening to see other people stepping up into that space.

One example is we are transitioning one of our Knowledge SUCCESS-led communities of practice to a youth-led organization. Is it going to look exactly the same? No, but it’s going to look exactly like what it needs to in order to carry on for the future. And I think that’s a win. This is not an ideal situation, right? But you can’t take away what people as individuals have gained from the work that we’ve done.

Sullivan: Given this whole shift in the donor and funding environment, we want to try to retain the people aspect of it. There’s been a big focus on databases and explicit knowledge, but at the same time, there’s also a dispersion of a lot of that tacit knowledge, that know-how or knowledge that is in people’s heads. The good news is that there’s so much goodwill in our community that if there’s mechanisms for bringing people together, people will come together and share their knowledge to continue to improve global health programs.

Desmon: One of my favorite things that Knowledge SUCCESS did was “The Pitch,” which was a competition you held for local organizations around the world doing knowledge management and they vied for $50,000 awards from the project and for guidance from CCP staff about their work.

How did that come about?

Sullivan: We developed what we called Knowledge Solutions. Through a series of regional workshops in Asia, West and East Africa and in North America, we talked with our audiences about their needs. Someone said, “We definitely want to have a better sense of what knowledge management innovations are taking place in the regions and countries where we were working.” Everyone had seen Shark Tank. We thought it would be fun to style the pitch like that. It also gave us an opportunity to nurture these innovations and give them a spot where they could grow over time.

Of course, it was so much fun to be able to award the $50,000 prizes. We wish we could have awarded more.

Mazursky: There’s a lot of amazing knowledge management capacity. But one of the barriers, identified by global health practitioners we spoke to, is seed funding. We’ve never really had a way to offer that where we are just providing support and guidance and funding. It was nice to be able to marry that need of some funding and a little bit of capacity strengthening support. With our network, we were able to share these innovations to a wider audience.

Some of those innovations were incredible and it was a really energizing activity for everybody who worked on it. You know, it was a novel approach in terms of having a competition in the way that it was run. But it’s not novel to work with locally led organizations and provide support.

Sullivan: One of our pitch winners that I remember fondly is the Strong Enough Girls’ Empowerment Initiative (SEGEI), a women-led, youth-focused non-profit committed to harnessing the intellectual and social strengths of adolescent girls and women through education, mentorship, life skills development and comprehensive family planning and sexuality education in Nigeria. They wanted to do bilingual radio programming, featuring real-life experiences of grassroots family planning leaders in West Africa in Nigeria and Niger sharing stories of what works and what doesn’t in reproductive health programming. They wound up doing this programming in multiple languages, and it had a powerful impact in the region. And, when they came to the Pitch, they were at the right moment when they just needed a little bit of seed money to help them take that idea out into the world.

Another one that comes to mind is White Ribbon Alliance in Malawi, which is a data dashboard for family planning. After winning money from “The Pitch,” it is now embedded within one of the governmental websites, so it’s in use, it’s practical, it’s sustainable, and that little bit of money helped to get it off the ground.

Funding local knowledge management innovations

Since 2020, The Pitch has supported 12 exciting innovations led by local and regional institutions, giving out $600,000 to organizations in Asia and Africa.

Folk Songs in Bangla

SERAC-Bangladesh used traditional Bangla folk songs in regional dialects to deliver locally relevant sexual and reproductive health messages to adolescents, bridging a critical language gap and supporting national health strategies.

Image credit: SERAC-Bangladesh and Visual Production

Family Planning Dashboard

White Ribbon Alliance Malawi developed user-friendly family planning dashboards on DHIS2 and Tableau Public to improve access to disaggregated contraceptive data, enabling broader use by health professionals, policymakers, and advocates to address challenges faced by women and girls.

SafeSphere Chatbot

The YP Foundation India created an initial prototype of SafeSphere, a WhatsApp-based chatbot with contraception and gender-based violence information for young adults in India.

Image credit: The YP Foundation India

Desmon: As this chapter comes to an end, what do you think is the future of knowledge management?

Mazursky: I’m looking forward to seeing how a lot of the people that we have collaborated with through our work in Knowledge SUCCESS and the predecessor projects step in to fill the gap that the end of USAID funding leaves. I think they will use the approaches that we’ve been talking about for the last decade. We were moving in the right direction because that’s what our audiences were asking for. That’s why I’m confident that others will step up into that gap. And while this is disappointing and it feels like the end of a chapter, we’ve been applying knowledge management to family planning and reproductive health for years, but we’ve also worked in other spaces in global health.

We know knowledge management can be applied in many areas. We’re starting to do it in smaller projects at CCP, applying that systematic approach to new technical areas. And maybe it’s the opening of a new era for us. But you need funding in order to do this right. The cost of knowledge management programs compared to some other interventions is modest. We have been able to do the work we have done because USAID funded us to do that, but the brain power and the energy behind all of that is still in the people and can be applied to different areas, and it doesn’t need to be such a big financial investment.

I’m heartened by that, because I’ve seen us do that. I’ve seen us start with this really big idea, and then if the budget or the timeline isn’t going to support that, we iterate on that idea and make it fit the parameters that we do have. And I think CCP as a whole is really good at doing that.

Desmon: Tara, I will leave you with the last word.

Sullivan: I think knowledge management is scalable to the scope and the resources that are available. It can be effective for a multi-million-dollar project, just as it can be effective for a business unit within an organization.

There’s a place for it everywhere. It brings stronger efficiency, effectiveness and faster timeline to impact. As I have said, knowledge management is a global health imperative. We must ensure we bring all the relevant knowledge and evidence to the table if we want to solve the big problems we are facing in this world. Because we can’t afford to not use it.

"Something as simple as a Whatsapp conversation on a topic for World Contraception Day can be turned into a simple infographic that is shareable on social media. They see their own voices and their own words, and they're like, ‘Oh, this is an interesting way of developing content.’"

"Data management is like all these little pieces of legos you sorted out. Now that you’ve sorted it out, you can make it into some kind of structure ... So that is knowledge management, because you put something into context, you package it in a way that's meaningful for whoever who will see it."

"With Knowledge SUCCESS, we converted people into believers, advocates and ambassadors of knowledge management, because the project gave an opportunity for people to put into practice everything that we were talking about."

"From a passionate communication specialist and relative newcomer to knowledge management, I have become a key figure in Knowledge Management within the region, driven by a constant ambition for innovation and sharing—intellectual generosity always at my side!"

"The work of Knowledge SUCCESS in Asia through the learning series resulted in an enthusiastic network of KM Champions. Many of them have gone on to use what they have learnt in their respective organizations. Some have started providing KM training to their downline teams, while others have gone further to collaborate in cross-country events and meetups."

Expertise

Focus Areas

Priorities

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Knowledge SUCCESS: Learn More. Share More. Do More.