Welcome - Developing Strategy (Mesh)

Guide: A Practical Guide to Planning an Engagement Strategy for your Global Health Research funding application

This Mesh guide is intended to support the preparation of a Community Engagement and Involvement (CEI) strategy. It is aimed at researchers who are planning an engagement strategy for a funding application, Public/Community Engagement leads who are planning engagement strategies for a specific piece of research, or anyone who is new to CEI and wants to learn more about it.

Mesh Strategic Plan

This article gives a brief introduction to the Mesh Community Engagement Network's Strategic Plan including the theory of change and streams of activity

Webinar: Taking relationships seriously: Findings from a realist review of community engagement

This webinar held in May 2022 on the REAL Community Engagement Realist Review shared some fascinating findings which give more conceptual clarity around how community engagement works in practice. It highlighted some key relationships and power dynamics at the heart of engagement work.

Guides & Tools: Public engagement and crowdfunding in health research

This practical guide was developed through a collaborative process of public engagement led by TDR Global. This practical guide provides tools, open-access resources and advice for researchers, especially those living in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).  

Guides & Tools: LBG Research Priority Setting Project Database

An available database developed by the LBG Open Innovation in Science Center for you to explore research priority setting projects worldwide and a research tool for unanswered research questions and under-researched topics.

Guide: Top Tips for Supporting Engagement through Seed Funding schemes

This guide is authored by public engagement staff across Wellcome Africa & Asia programmes and it shares their learning from setting up and running seed funding grant schemes to support engagement projects embedded in research

Guide: Essential Principles & Practices for GPP Compliance: Engaging stakeholders in biomedical research during the era of COVID-19

This tool from AVAC in intended to help guide stakeholder engagement in COVID-19 research. Built from the Good Participatory Practice Guidelines for Biomedical HIV Prevention Trials (GPP), it responds to needs expressed by both researchers and advocates.

Guide: UNICEF Minimum Quality Standards and Indicators in Community Engagement

UNICEF C4D's Minimum quality standards and indicators in community engagement provide globally established guidance on the contribution of community engagement in development practice as well as humanitarian action.

Project Report: H3Africa Community Engagement Working Group

The Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) consortium's Community Engagement Working Group was established in 2015. They have developed preliminary Guidelines on CE to support genetics and genomics research

Published Report: Supporting Strong Engagement Practice in Clinical Trials

This report from Hilo Consultants Ltd outlines the key themes arising from a workshop session held in October 2020 which sought to look at ways of supporting strong practice in engagement within clinical trials.

Guide: Meaningful Engagement Online

This guide from NCCPE in the UK draws on the expertise around online science engagement and aims to support the development of meaningful and valuable experiences online.

Mesh Strategic Plan 2019-2022

This article gives a brief introduction to the Mesh Community Engagement Network's Strategic Plan 2019 - 2022 including the theory of change and streams of activity

Report: Generating leadership and capacity in engagement

This 2019 report was commissioned by the Wellcome Trust to catalyse future discussion amongst a broad set of stakeholders about ways of strengthening community and public engagement in global health

Engagement Strategies: The Development of Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit’s (MORU) Community and Stakeholder Engagement Strategy

Embedding Engagement in Research

Literature: Elements of effective community engagement: lessons from a targeted malaria elimination study in Lao PDR (Laos)

This article draws on experience of designing and implementing community engagement in Laos for Targeted Malaria Elimination (TME). It identifies five key elements of effective community engagement for mass antimalarial administration in this setting.

Article: Culturally relevant experiences in informal science education institutes

Community Health Decision-Making: The Power of Focus Groups in Rural Communities

This study, which took place in the U.S, may be of interest to Mesh readers interested in the power of 'community voice' on decision-making in health policy and research.  

Community Planning Toolkit: Community Engagement

A toolkit of methods and guidance on collaborative decision making and community planning.

Workshop Report: ‘Community Engagement – Under the Microscope’ in Thailand in June 2011

A summary of a report exploring Community Engagement, what it means to global health researchers and its relationship to research ethics. 

Guide: Performing Ethics: Using Participatory Theatre to Explore Ethical Issues in Community Based Participatory Research

Literature: Beginning community engagement at a busy biomedical research programme: Experiences from the KEMRI CGMRC-Wellcome Trust Research Programme (Kilifi, Kenya)

An article published in Social Science & Medicine summarising the rationale for community engagement in research. The article draws upon published literature and local findings to outline the process of community engagement in Kilifi, Kenya and to describe issues emerging from its development and early implementation. It also briefly reviews literature on Community Advisory Boards and a range of related ethical, methodological and contextual issues related to developing effective methods for community engagement.

Community Engagement and the Human Infrastructure of Global Health Research

This paper proposes an ethical framework for Community Engagement. The framework is grounded in the insight that relationships between the researcher and the community extend beyond the normal bounds of the researcher-research participant encounter and are the foundation of meaningful engagement.