Health campaigns are time-bound and intermittent activities to address specific epidemiologic challenges, fill delivery gaps, or provide surge coverage for health interventions. They can be used to help respond to disease outbreaks (such as COVID-19), eliminate targeted diseases as a public health problem (such as with river blindness), eradicate disease altogether (as was achieved with smallpox), or address other health challenges. Campaigns are credited with expanding life-saving interventions to millions of individuals.
As a delivery modality often used in low resource settings, campaigns face challenges in reaching their targets for coverage and equity. The siloed nature of campaigns contributes to these challenges, as the field has historically lacked mechanisms to share learning across different campaigns, coordinate where multiple campaigns are executed concurrently, and limit unintended consequences on health delivery system.
On behalf of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Camber conducted a landscape analysis of the campaign ecosystem to identify opportunities to improve coverage, equity, cost-effectiveness, and impact for campaigns across five priority health areas. The landscaping effort highlighted the need for a coalition committed to enhancing campaigns’ and health systems’ effectiveness to help address critical gaps and meet public health needs.
Following the landscaping effort, the Foundation issued a grant to the Task Force for Global Health to bring together a group of core stakeholders to develop a coalition. Camber supported the Task Force in bringing together a variety of campaign stakeholders across the five health areas – including government actors, coordinating bodies, researchers and implementers – in collaborative working sessions to design an effective infrastructure for the coalition. The Health Campaign Effectiveness Coalition launched in late 2020, and since then has completed critical work to promote campaign learning, collaboration, systems change across health areas.