The post Protecting Our Future: Quantifying the Climate Adaptation Benefits of Health Investments for Gavi and AIIB appeared first on Camber Collective.

The post Task Force for Global Health Campaign Effectiveness Coalition appeared first on Camber Collective.

Even as women live more years with poorer quality of life than men,[2] research and development (R&D) to address women’s health issues is chronically underfunded, with the majority of investment concentrated among just a few funders. Collectively, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institutes of Health account for the vast majority of women’s health funding, making up over 60% of funding for sexual and reproductive health alone.

In early 2023, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women’s Health engaged Camber Collective* to develop a partnership of women’s health experts, innovators, and advocates—the Innovation Equity Forum (IEF)—to identify the top opportunities to advance innovation for women’s health worldwide. Over nine months, the Forum produced the Women’s Health Innovation Opportunity Map report, which highlights 50 opportunities that can advance women’s health innovation and strengthen the R&D ecosystem within the next 15 years.

Camber played two key roles throughout this project. First, we engaged over 250 stakeholders as members of the IEF over the course of nine months to identify, prioritize, and expound the top opportunities for women’s health across nine topics, such as data and modeling and non-communicable diseases. This co-creation approach to the development of the Opportunity Map was intentionally designed to ensure diverse perspectives shaped the report.

IEF members represented over 50 countries, with IEF leadership positions held equally by members from low- and middle-income countries and high-income countries. Members were representative of a variety of sectors, age groups, and races and ethnicities and the majority of members were women.

A key feature of the stakeholder engagement was equitable participation that put decision making largely in the hands of IEF members. Members were able to participate across a range of modalities, including virtual meetings and white boarding sessions, asynchronous drafting and feedback, and a hybrid in-person and virtual convening.

At the convening, members developed solution strategies to identify the necessary actions to realize the opportunities. The convening balanced plenary sessions for information sharing, breakout sessions for brainstorming and co-creation, and unstructured social gatherings to ensure the convening objectives were met while simultaneously building a stronger partnership among IEF members.

In our second role, Camber led the development of the Women’s Health Innovation Opportunity Map, which serves as a guide for key actors to prioritize their investments in and advocacy for women’s health R&D. The stakeholder engagement process and convening provided the key inputs to the Opportunity Map and Camber provided the analysis and synthesis necessary to ensure a cohesive and actionable final product.

Camber also developed a toolkit to empower IEF members to disseminate the opportunities and galvanize additional stakeholders to invest in women’s health.

The Opportunity Map will have impact for years to come, as stakeholders begin tapping into the opportunities and implementing the solution strategies. We anticipate three key outcomes:

1. Improved equitable inclusion, participation, and funding of women across the R&D continuum.
2. Increased investment in women’s health innovation that addresses critical needs for diverse groups of women and leads to a high return on investment, including financial returns and health and social benefits.
3. Strengthened partnership and alignment of key stakeholders to create a more robust, well-funded, and equitable women’s health R&D ecosystem.

The Women’s Health Innovation Opportunity Map was launched at the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in October 2023, along with a request for proposals from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund near-term investments in these opportunities. The full Opportunity Map can be found here.

*The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation contracted Camber Collective for this work.

The post Women’s Health Innovation Opportunity Map appeared first on Camber Collective.

Social norms on reproductive health and sexuality, and access to family planning services, are deeply influenced by a society’s history, culture and access to resources. But family planning is also intimate and deeply personal. Women and men make decisions about when to have children as they navigate  their social, emotional and relational lives, and pursue opportunities related to career, education, and community service. So, in order to support the government of Benin in developing country-level policy around reproductive health, Camber first wanted to take the time to deeply engage with youth, and better understand their hopes, plans for the futures, and challenges and joys in everyday life.

Working in partnership with the Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherche sur les Dynamiques Sociales et le Développement Local, Camber conducted a multi-faceted qualitative research with young men and women in rural and urban areas. The research combined a number of methodologies, and including focus groups, in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation. Through “photovoice” we asked participants to document their day-to-day lives with photography, generating rich visual data on their role models, ambitions, perspectives, and what matters to them.

This data generated a number of rich insights on youth’s experiences and needs around reproductive health. We learned, for instance, about young women’s aspirations and desire for family, interest in defying gender norms which limit women to the household, and frustration with a lack of work opportunities.  We heard about how women seek information on reproductive health, receiving a myriad of diverse messages (from friends, family, peers, media, health workers) while trying to discern the truth of what will work best for them in their lives. We heard about how young women’s outlooks differ from their mothers, and how they are navigating a landscape of rapidly shifting social norms.

These qualitative insights gave us perspective on how young women are experiencing numerous pressures, working towards multiple ambitions, and how their interest in and access to family planning sits at the intersection of social, cultural and economic factors in their lives. Based on these insights, we crafted a quantitative survey which allowed us to understand how these dynamics play out and impact family planning at a population level. We worked collaboratively with the government of Benin, and with local youth organizers, to develop a strategy for improving youth access to family planning, and a  communications plan to promote family planning in terms that resonate with young women and meet their needs. 

The post Benin Ethnography appeared first on Camber Collective.

This challenge was taken up by several central players in the nutrition and food fortification space. A core group of technical experts conceptualized the idea of developing a public database for high-quality data on food fortification, then calling upon Camber to manage the strategic alignment around shared goals, guide development of the database, and form a longer-term sustainability plan for the platform. Camber supported the early steps of this process, culminating in a formal announcement of the forthcoming database at a large global nutrition conference. Our team then worked to oversee the development of a prototype web-based platform, interfacing closely with an expert development team to co-design the web platform and test the preliminary database tool. 

Camber’s involvement culminated in the development of a high-level communication approach and corresponding materials to accompany the completed data platform. The web-based platform was formally launched to the public by the group of partners and is actively managed and updated by that group. It remains the only consolidated source of data on food fortification legislation status, fortification levels, and other critical information for country governments, donors, industry, and other key stakeholders. 

The post Food Fortification Database appeared first on Camber Collective.

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. 

The post Campaign Effectiveness Coalition appeared first on Camber Collective.

The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation engaged Camber to provide a strategic analysis of the demand landscape in Niger, relying on in-depth qualitative research and a national survey, and complemented by a robust supply analysis.  The work’s objective was to provide a common fact base that Niger’s family planning community—including Government and international donors—could use to drive decision-making, as well as to highlight gaps between supply and demand.

A nuanced picture of family planning in Niger emerged from this work. While there have been notable strides in contraceptive supply, the demand picture remains challenging, and will likely take significantly more time and resources to resolve. We found that many women in Niger do not believe that they have control over their own fertility decisions (they believe that Allah or their husbands have control), or they believe they have control, but want many children nevertheless. 

Within this broad demand landscape, we found significant variation in women’s demand for family planning.  Using advanced statistical analyses, we derived five segments of women with discrete family planning needs, attitudes, and behaviors—representing the first segmentation of its kind (predictive of human behavior) to be developed in reproductive health services in Africa.  In Niger’s resource constrained environment, the segmentation allows Government, donors, and NGOs to focus on segments with the highest potential for contraceptive uptake, or to take different segments’ needs into account when defining policy and programming.

We are currently working with a range of partners, including the Ministry of Health, Animas-Sutura, Pathfinder, EngenderHealth, and Population Services International, to integrate this work’s findings into family planning programming and communications in Niger. We are also expanding our insights and strategy work into Burkina Faso, Côte D’Ivoire, Mauritania and Togo.

The post Family Planning in Niger appeared first on Camber Collective.