Knowledge Generation

The West Virginia Community Development Hub in the U.S. will capture and share accounts of the hard-won achievements of rural community leaders to challenge cultural and economic stereotypes about Central Appalachia's diverse rural communities in the face of poverty. They will use their existing network within these communities to produce texts, photographs and videos that share the lives of leaders and innovators who have worked hard to improve the quality of life in their communities.

The U.S. Dream Academy in the U.S. will produce a series of accounts of the lived experiences of children of incarcerated parents faced with poverty and highlight their resilience in overcoming adversity. More than 2.2 million children have incarcerated parents and live largely in poverty. Parental incarceration is often associated with shame and stigma, and ultimately leads to poor education and mental health, particularly for minority communities.

The "In Our Backyards" team at the Vera Institute of Justice in the U.S. will lead a narrative change campaign challenging the criminalization of poverty in smaller cities and rural communities. High and rising rates of incarceration in small town and rural America disproportionately impact the poor and people of color and stand as a major barrier to economic mobility. The team will launch a campaign that includes people affected by the justice system in Kentucky and Indiana and use data science to index the stories and demonstrate the human impact of incarceration.

Strengthen ND in the U.S. will encourage North Dakotans experiencing poverty to take up the rich local tradition of homesteading by using stories to connect the diverse populations of new residents and longtime rural residents. Homesteading was the original mode of economic mobility for European migrants in the 19th and 20th centuries. The recent energy boom brought in more families from around the world, including from refugee camps, creating a more diverse population not fully sufficient in terms of opportunities for economic growth.

Brandeis University and Boston University in the U.S. will gather and disseminate the life histories of people who have suffered economic decline to highlight the dynamic nature of the underlying causes and better inspire empathy. Economic and social decline often lurches in fits and starts over a lifetime, driven by diverse, interrelated factors such as family resources and relationships. However, most studies on social mobility focus on a specific moment in time.

James Lavery of Emory University in the U.S. will adapt an organizational learning tool to enable global health campaigns to draw on their experiences, improve their partner interactions, and enhance their overall impact. Global health campaigns are primarily evaluated in terms of program delivery and outcomes. However, these large and complex organizations interact with many different partners, and there is an untapped opportunity to improve their performance by learning about how their design and approaches affect each other.

Hannah Wild of Stanford University in the U.S. will develop a modelling-based approach that uses remote sensing and geospatial analysis to include neglected and high-risk nomadic populations in health databases and for campaign planning. Nomadic pastoralists are some of the poorest populations but they are often missed by health services and campaigns because they are difficult to track. They will design algorithms and methods that use satellite imagery and open access geospatial data to capture population movements over time, which will be validated in the field.

DRC is witnessing a very complex and long standing humanitarian crises with about 13 mio people in dire need of assistance. With less then 1 physician/10.000 people in DRC, and even fewer in conflict areas, health facilities such as Rural Health Centers (RHC) are left without skilled staff and lack access to essential quality health care. This results, amongst others, in too many women and newborns dying during childbirth, and epidemics spreading rapidly due to poor field diagnosis.

An ALNAP survey (2010) notes that the most difficult challenge recognised by the humanitarian system is “poorly coordinated response efforts/lack of effective leadership". This is largely due to information flow impediments, including inaccessibility, unwillingness, inconsistency, inadequate stream of information, low information priority, source identification difficulty, storage media misalignment and unreliability. Information flow impediments limit coordination and paralyse decision-making.

Access to and quality of health services are major concerns in conflict settings where destruction of health facilities and loss of health professionals limit capacity. Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, there have been 485 attacks on health facilities and 60% of hospitals are destroyed or seriously damaged (1,2). Innovative approaches to supporting facility and community care using para-professionals are urgently needed given significant losses of health facilities and staff (1,2).