The Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs will share insights on its global work and lead conversations about how social and behavior change and knowledge management can strengthen health systems at the 2024 Global Health Practitioner Conference, which begins today in Nairobi, Kenya.
The conference is being hosted by the CORE Group, a community of global health practitioners. Along with making several presentations, CCP is one of the sponsors of the conference.
Today, Senior Program Officer Heather Hancock is co-leading a four-hour interactive workshop, with ideas42, a partner on the CCP-led Breakthrough ACTION project, on how to improve programs by integrating social and behavior change activities. She will, among other things, discuss a recent behavioral diagnosis exercise that looked at why donors and organizations don’t invest more in social and behavior change, an approach proven, among other things, to improve health systems.
Hancock says that many country governments rely on the World Health Organization’s health system building blocks to structure their health funding and activities. What the Breakthrough ACTION project has done, she says, is looked at those building blocks, which cover everything from service delivery to health care workforce and highlighted what social and behavior change can contribute to each block, something lacking in the original model.
“SBC is not just about demand generation, or getting people to be aware of something,” she says. “It goes much beyond that to changing norms and the way that the health system operates, helping to advance guidelines or policies that would help support providers and clients, and engaging communities in governance and accountability. It can be so many things – all of them beneficial to facilities, workers and the community.”
Senior Program Officer Elizabeth Tully, who works in knowledge management, and Grace Miheso, chief of party for Breakthrough ACTION in Kenya, will host a session entitled, “Prioritizing Community Insights to Strengthen Global Health Systems through Innovative Knowledge Management and Social and Behavior Change Approaches.” Tully will talk about a technique used by the CCP-led Knowledge SUCCESS project that uses peer-to-peer sharing of both successes and failures, including experiences from work in 40 countries.
“The overall goal is to show how CCP projects are using approaches that really put the community and the important stakeholders at the center,” Tully says. “It’s not other people deciding what is important to a community but instead it is about gaining insights and thoughts from communities themselves about what is working, how to better engage with them and how to mobilize them.”
Tully and Hancock will also present at the conference’s “Appy Hour,” designed to “showcase practical, data-driven mobile and digital platforms that are not only transforming technology but also delivering measurable improvements in community health and health outcomes.”
There, along with CCP Program Officer Ashley Riley, Hancock will be highlighting SBC Learning Central, 55 online courses and toolkits designed to provide public health professionals with foundational knowledge and skills to incorporate new social and behavior change methodologies into their work. Since its launch in 2023, nearly 5,800 people from around the world have earned certificates through taking the free courses.
“We’ll be emphasizing the quick growth in membership and certificates received since launching, its availability in English and French, that it’s mobile friendly, and its interactivity,” she says. “It’s a great opportunity to share what we have learned with others.”
Tully says her Appy Hour session will focus on FP Insight, an innovation from the Knowledge SUCCESS project, and how this user-driven platform helps global health professionals to organize and share their favorite resources among the user base (similar to Pinterest).
Tully will also lead a technical roundtable on how to integrate equity into knowledge management initiatives, which helps break down barriers in unfair, avoidable, and remediable differences in being able to access information among global health professionals.
