Co-Creation: What Brought Us Here?
Members of the PHE Policy and Practice group convened in Washington, DC for a Knowledge SUCCESS co-creation workshop in February 2020. Photo credit: Knowledge SUCCESS.
In early 2020, Knowledge SUCCESS kicked off the process of co-creating a solution to strengthen the sharing and exchange of Population, Health, and Environment (PHE) knowledge across a global community. In a co-creation process, individuals who have a stake in the development of a new tool, product, or service are invited to participate in a step-by-step process to ensure that the solution meets their needs—considering the strengths, barriers, and opportunities of the current situation. (Learn more about co-creation.)
Knowledge SUCCESS conducted three workshops with participants who work in PHE and cross-sectoral programming—one workshop each in the United States, East Africa, and Asia. We found many common themes across participants from all three regions related to difficulties locating and using resources that are relevant in their work.
First, when they can’t find PHE resources, this challenge is typically caused by:
- General lack of PHE resources available online
- No central website for information, resources, and tools for PHE
- Not enough time to visit multiple websites to find necessary resources
Second, once they find resources, there is a perceived gap in quality and validity and a general scarcity of evidence-based programmatic information with clear and strong data. Participants shared several reasons for this gap, including:
- Difficulties in coordination and partnership among integrated programs and sectors to collect evidence and data
- Short PHE program life cycles, which impose time constraints on building the evidence base
- No peer review process to authenticate information
Of the six brainstormed solutions (or “prototypes”) in our co-creation workshops, three involved an online platform that provides visitors with a robust repository of PHE resources and a space to have virtual interactions with others working in similar programs. We combined the ideas from these three prototypes to create a solution that could be used by PHE partners around the globe.