Community Engagement

Approval and Support; We work closely with the Ministry of Health and Child Welfare, and in particular with the Department of Nutrition. Our current field work takes place in Shurguwi District where we have a longstanding partnership with the District Health Committee.  Recently, Zvitambo formalized its relationship with the District supporting the creation of a community advisory board called the District Health Research Steering Committee.   

The results of our research are fed back to communities on an ongoing basis.  Findings from the SHINE trial were made into a film [link].  

Policies 

ZVITAMBO trial: the impact was that we were able to push for exclusive breastfeeding from 0 to 6 months.  

Changed what is on the national health card. 

Key impacts of the SHINE Trial on policy SHINE

Transformative WASH 

Lancet Commission 

Since the SHINE code was broken in September 2017, Jean Humphrey worked to understand the findings in context of other literature, coordinated the preparation of a consensus paper co-authored by 20 investigators of the WASH Benefits Bangladesh and Kenya trials and the SHINE trial (Ref 53) and present and discuss these interpretations to several audiences of people mostly from the WASH sector.  These included:   

Gates Foundation, November 2017;  

World Bank (Washington DC), Feb 2018 

USAID (Washington DC), Feb 2018 

UNICEF (New York) February 2018;  

Senegal Gates MEDS meeting (Sept 2018);  

UNC Water and Health meeting (Oct 2018); V 

alencia Nutrition and Growth (March 2019),  

CAPGAN Toronto (September 2019),  

Lancet WASH Commission (October 2019). 

The key conclusions of the Lancet WASH Commission planning meeting were a call for: 

  • Universal access to professionally designed and managed water and sanitation systems:  responsibility for clean water and safe sanitation should not be on households or lay communities (it should not be “do-it-yourself”) but rather designed and managed by engineers and be “invisible” to the user. 
  • These water and sanitation services should be evaluated by population surveillance of enteropathogen carriage:  the objective evidence of whether fecal-oral transmission has been interrupted or not.