Welcome - Embedding CE in Research Programmes (Mesh)

Project Report: Creative Arts and Social Inclusion: Engaging communities with substance misuse and HIV in Zimbabwe

Substance abuse and HIV are highly prevalent, complex and often misunderstood conditions among young people in Zimbabwe. Supported by the DELTAS Africa CPE Seed Fund, Clement Nhunzvi and his team in Zimbabwe used a creative arts competition to engage school children (13-20 years) in social inclusion and stigma reduction when confronting substance abuse and HIV in the community.

Project Report: Scrutinized: Harnessing adolescence advocacy to end TB in Botswana

This project from Botswana-Harvard AIDS Institute Partnership, supported by the DELTAS Africa CPE Seed Fund, used storytelling and film to explore perceptions and attitudes to HIV/TB in schools in Gaborone, Botswana

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: 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.

Toolkit: AVAC GPP Listing, Scoring, Ranking Tool

This tool, developed by the site staff of the Microbicide Development Program in Tanzania, can be used to help community, trial participants, or staff members, prioritize issues and concerns central to the trial. This tool can serve as a platform to generate a list of potential issues and provide direction for what or which issues should take priority at the research site.

Toolkit: AVAC GPP Circle Diagram Tool

Using this tool, participants can raise and explore issues they perceive as priorities in HIV prevention research; discovering links between them. An interactive and fun way for community members and participants to be involved with the planning of HIV prevention research at the site.

Toolkit: AVAC GPP Trial Site Binder

The GPP Trial Site Binder is a companion tool to the Good Participatory Practice guidelines that research teams can use to help develop, organize and document the stakeholder engagement activity at the site. The binder is is divided into sixteen sections aligned with the guidelines. Each section contains key steps to help research staff follow the practices, templates for documenting and planning activities, and a place to file draft documents.

Toolkit: AVAC GPP Blueprint for Stakeholder Engagement

The GPP Blueprint is a companion to the Good Participatory Practice guidelines for biomedical HIV prevention research. It is a step-by-step guide designed for the research team members in charge of stakeholder engagement. It presents questions, worksheets and explanations that can guide and generate a stakeholder engagement plan for a specific trial or research program.

Guide: Involving Communities - MSF Guidance document for approaching and cooperating with communities

This guidance document is based on the joint work of the Vienna Evaluation Unit and MSF OCBA and discusses community-based approaches to medical anthropology and qualitative 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.

Project Report: Right to Food Project - In their Voices

“Right to Food Project” was implemented by the African Population and Health Research Center from 2018 to 2019 in urban Kenya. Different participatory visual methodologies were used to engage with the community members on the right to food. These included graffiti and wall murals, digital stories, photovoice, radio shows, human libraries, participatory educative theaters, open air events and community dialogue.

Guide: NIHR Resource Guide for CEI in Global Health Research

Researchers funded by the NIHR Global Health Research Programme are expected to involve patients and the public in planning, implementation and evaluation of their research. This resource guide provides community engagement links, resources, references and learning to offer research teams and funding applicants a starting point

News: International Network on Patient and Public Involvement (PPI)

The International Network for Public Involvement and Engagement in Health and Social Care Research was launched in London on 27th November 2017. Our vision is for a world where patient and public involvement is an integral part of health research.

Literature: Planning for the social and economic impacts emerging from school-university engagement with research

In this article from the Journal of Science Communication (2015) the authors reflect on their work with teachers and students at a local school in Milton Keynes in the UK. They propose a flexible and adaptive metric to support all stakeholders with planning school engagement.

Literature: Who should decide about children’s and adolescents’ participation in health research?

This paper from BMC Medical Ethics explores how researchers and research centres can activtly involve children and young people in health research activities and in the development of research proposals. They used group discussions with community members and schools students in rural Kenya to explore views on the topic.

Guide: INTRAC introduces M&E Universe

INTRAC has launched the M&E universe, a free, online resource for development practitioners involved in monitoring and evaluation (M&E).

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

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. 

Article: Community Engagement for the Rapid Elimination of Malaria: the Case of Kayin State, Myanmar

This article outlines Community Engagement efforts linked to a Targeted Malaria Elimination (TME) project in four Kayin State villages, in Myanmar where there is a real threat from the spread of drug resistant parasites. The Community Engagement programme was aimed at promoting population uptake and adherence to Mass drug administrations (MDA) in the region.

Guide: Introduction to Evaluating Engagement

Robin Vincent, Evaluation Consultant, UK gives an introduction to evaluating engagement with particular focus on the Theory of Change approach and how complexity in engagement can be navigated in evaluation.

Project Report: The Spectrum of Engagement

Project Report: Engagement in the H3Africa Consortium

Literature: People’s Knowledge and Participatory Action Research Book

Organisations that undertake research, engagement and policy work are dominated by white middle-class men. The basic question the book attempts to answer is: "what happens when these institutions attempt working with the rest of the world, which is different and diverse?”

Project Report: Samala Moyo

Samala Moyo is an interactive exhibition with an outreach component designed to open the Malawi–Liverpool– Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme (MLW) to the local community and creatively explore crucial topics in medical research. The project was developed from a small International Engagement Award-funded pilot project and subsequently received £188,000.

Guide: Community Stakeholder Engagement (CSE) Monitoring Toolkit

This user friendly set of quantitative and qualitative monitoring and evaluation tools allows users to capture, collate and analyze Community and Stakeholder Engagement (CSE) data at the clinical trial site-level. The database is designed to support engagement teams working on clinical trials on a daily, monthly, quarterly and biannual basis.

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.

Guide: Recommendations for Community Engagement in HIV/AIDS Research Version 2.0

These recommendations are intended as a tool to help research staff and community representatives expand and deepen existing partnerships, and forge new ones, with the ultimate goal of facilitating effective community engagement in all aspects of clinical trials research.