Trending Topics
The Compass team undertakes an intensive search to identify and make available quality resources & tools for our users each month. Users are also encouraged to participate in the process by contributing materials & ideas for future packages.
NOTE: This is an update of a previous Trending Topic.
This update includes recently produced tools and examples. Newly added items are at the top of each list.
Gender roles and relations impact a broad array of health and development issues—from economic empowerment to governance to violence against women and HIV and AIDS. Social norms and expectations of how men and women should behave are a key determinant of health and development outcomes, as are structural issues such as inequitable laws and policies. Over the last decade, the field of gender equality programming has grown in its scope and sophistication, tackling our understanding of femininity and masculinity, as well as addressing gender as a continuum by looking at transgender and intersex issues.
Community engagement is a proven social and behavior change (SBC) strategy that has helped people around the world identify and address pressing health issues.[1] According to UNICEF, community engagement focuses on collective or group participation. It empowers communities and their social networks to reflect on and address a range of behaviors, issues and decisions that affect their lives and to become proactively involved in their community's development. Community engagement is a strategy that raises awareness and strengthens the community's capacity to effect change.
Global health has historically been dominated by United Nations agencies and bilateral organizations, but new and important partnerships with the private sector have emerged since the 1990s. According to the United States Agen
“Human-Centered Design (HCD) is a process, one that requires a deep understanding of people. It starts with observations and then a rigorous attempt to use those observations to determine the true underlying issues and needs, a process that might be called "Problem Defining" (as opposed to problem solving). Then, these needs and issues are addressed through an iterative, evidence-based procedure of observation, ideation, prototyping, and testing, with each cycle of the iteration going deeper and deeper into the solution space. The result is a form of incremental innovation, optimizing the solution through a hill-climbing process” [1]
The Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) was launched in February 2014 to advance a world safe and secure from infectious disease threats, to bring together nations from all over the world to make new, concrete commitments, and to elevate global health security as a national leaders-level priority.
Male engagement in family planning (FP) improves reproductive health and gender outcomes.* In many settings, men play a dominant role in decisions such as family size and the use of contraceptives. Men's critical role in FP decisions makes it important to include them in FP programming. Programs engaging men can enhance spousal communication, improve gender-equitable attitudes, and increase FP use.**
HIV-related stigma is a key barrier to testing and treatment. In October 2017, UNAIDS released a report stating that people living with HIV who experience high levels of HIV-related stigma are more than twice as likely to delay enrolment into care than people who do not perceive HIV-related stigma. Stigma plays a role in losses throughout the treatment continuum and remains a key barrier to improving HIV outcomes.
Service providers, whether facility or community based, are a key link between communities and health systems. A provider’s direct interactions with clients means they play a crucial role as facilitator and potential barrier to their clients adopting healthy behaviors. A service provider’s opinions and biases, attitudes and behaviors, capacity and skills, and working conditions can influence their ability or motivation to deliver quality services. Such barriers may be outcomes of individual, interpersonal, organizational, and institutional factors.
Segmentation is the process of dividing a large audience into smaller groups of people - or segments - who have similar needs, values or characteristics. It recognizes that different groups will respond differently to social and behavior change (SBC) messages and interventions. Segmenting audiences enables a program to focus on those audience members who are most critical to reach and also to design the most effective and efficient strategy for helping each audience adopt new behaviors.
Use of insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) is one of the main interventions to prevent malaria, and high ITN use rates are a central goal of malaria programs. The four standard indicators to assess outcomes have assessed the percentage of: 1) households owing at least 1 ITN, 2) population with access to an ITN within their household, 3) households owing at least 1 ITN for every 2 people, and 4) population that used an ITN the previous night.
