Technical Assistance
The HCDExchange offers technical assistance to teams interested in integrating HCD into their public health programs or their organizations ways of working. Our technical assistance model is centered around providing HCD technical expertise and capacity development to ensure that this expertise is embedded within the relevant organization teams so that HCD solutions or ways of working are feasible to implement, and can be sustained and retained over time.
We understand that implementing solutions can be daunting; therefore our model provides HCD technical support beyond program design. We assist in research, solution design, program implementation, and learning and documentation for public health programs. We believe that HCD is a process with multiple use cases and can be applied to varied challenges ranging from designing user-driven solutions to rethinking organizational structures. Our technical assistance services are designed to be adapted to your unique context and challenge.
If you are interested in our Technical Assistance services please reach out to us at consulting@hcdexchange.org
Our Technical Assistance services include:
Capacity
in HCD
Our designers and public health experts support program teams with HCD technical support, training, and guidance to adopt HCD tools and frameworks throughout the program lifecycle. We also provide support for integrating HCD into the organization’s current ways of working, proposals and ongoing programming.
HCD
Research
We conduct formative HCD research to support program teams in gaining a deeper understanding of the people and systems engaged in their programs, and the challenge they are trying to address.
Learning and
Documentation
We believe that learning and documentation is crucial for a program and for the public health field to evolve. Our Technical Assistance services support public health organizations to capture, document, and disseminate learnings from HCD+Public Health projects. To do this we use HCD-inspired and community-driven formats of engagement.
Technical assistance services at the HCDExchange are informed by three impact areas which focus on localization, workforce development and user-driven health solutions.
Current and Past Projects
YIELD Hub Capacity in HCD
The Youth Investment, Engagement, Leadership and Development (YIELD) Hub improves young people’s partnership in Adolescent and Youth Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) by facilitating action learning processes and influencing norm change. The HCDExchange is engaged by the YIELD Hub for the third time since 2023 to support 30 organizations participating in their Action Learning Cycle. The purpose of HCDExchange’s engagement is to embed HCD approaches in the Action Learning Cycle thereby supporting the organizations in effectively using HCD tools and frameworks that are applicable for the goals they are trying to achieve. The expected outcome of this engagement is for all Cycle members to have robust and feasible Action Learning Plans that engage their key stakeholders in co-creating the approach for achieving their Action Learning goals.
The HAPPI Activity HCD Research
The HPV Vaccine Acceleration Program Partners Initiative (HAPPI) Consortium funded by the Gates Foundation is a 3-year project designed to accelerate Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This activity will assess and explore potential solutions to gender-related HPV vaccination barriers at the individual, household, community, and health systems levels in Indonesia and Nigeria. The HCDExchange is supporting this activity through HCD research to capture participants’ experiences and perspectives. This will be done by using HCD approaches to engage in a collaborative process of understanding, ideating, creating, testing, and implementing solutions together with the program participants for impactful and sustainable positive change.
USAID Advancing Nutrition Learning and Documentation
The USAID Advancing Nutrition (UAN) project team at John Snow, Inc. (JSI) engaged the HCDExchange for the end of project documentation and dissemination spanning from August to November 2023. The UAN project aimed to strengthen the ecosystem to support country-led scale-up of effective, integrated, and sustainable multi-sectoral nutrition programs using social behavior change (SBC). As the project ended in November 2023, the team sought to demonstrate the learnings and results from project interventions through documentation and dissemination. It also sought to explore further the integration of SBC and HCD approaches for better program outcomes. The HCDExchange team supported the UAN team in documenting, learning, synthesizing, and disseminating findings and recommendations on the use of HCD and Living-Labs approaches for implementation research in Zimbabwe and Malawi.
BMGF Data & Insights Platform Build
The HCDExchange received funding from BMGF to build a Data and Insights Platform. This open-source platform will be a resource for AYSRH-focused organizations and will provide ways for implementers and design teams to share their data and insights for the benefit of others. The platform will support program teams and organizations in challenging their assumptions or biases before engaging with a specific population or stakeholder group, while also supporting researchers in crafting more realistic and meaningful hypotheses for user research. Our objectives are to build and test the infrastructure of this platform to determine its value before launching it for public access.
We are committed to supporting you in applying HCD within your Public Health programs or organizations. If you are interested in our Technical assistance services please reach out to us at consulting@hcdexchange.org
We are committed to supporting you in applying HCD within your Public Health programs or organizations. If you are interested in our Technical assistance services please reach out to us at consulting@hcdexchange.org