Maternal and Child Survival Program Polio Communication Program Summary [Knowledge Dissemination]

Knowledge Dissemination

A major component of MCSP's polio communication knowledge dissemination work has focused on engaging networks of people and organizations with an interest in SBCC and, more narrowly, those working directly on polio and/or immunization communication. The wider network may not be working in polio or immunization communication but will have an interest in the knowledge in and experiences with one of the world's largest health programs with significant investments in communication.

For its wider network, MCSP used the network of The CI, which stands at 103,000 members who registered with The CI website and/or subscribed to one of its newsletters, in combination with events, such as the SBCC Summit in Nusa Dua, which brought together people working on communications across a range of development sectors. These networks provided MCSP with an audience of potentially interested people and organizations to disseminate polio communication lessons beyond the world of polio.

For the more focused network, MCSP built on previous work and capacities mentioned in the introduction. This network is made up of organizations receiving USAID funding for polio projects; partners within the GPEI, such as WHO and UNICEF; and, importantly, individuals who work on or have an interest in immunization and polio communication. The latter part of the network is made up of people who registered for The Polio Network website and subscribed to the Immunisation, Vaccines and Polio newsletter.

MCSP's knowledge dissemination strategies involve engaging these networks in a range of different ways:

• USAID and GPEI partner engagement to distill polio communication lessons
• Participation in major communication conferences to share lessons
• Workshops to share research methodologies and findings
• High-level roundtables to identify issues and feed research into policy discussions
• Sharing perspectives from polio thought leaders through interviews and editorials
• Maintaining a website with constantly updated content and platforms for discussion
• Promoting that content through newsletters with large subscriber bases

Partner Engagement to Distill Lessons

MCSP has been supporting the distillation of polio lessons from its own work and that of other USAID-funded polio projects for the past several years. This has been done through workshops that bring agencies together to discuss experiences and identify lessons that have been central to the successes of the polio program, and those that have relevance for other health and development sectors. This has been accomplished through facilitation of workshops, such as the one held by the Global CORE Group Polio Project in Ethiopia in April 2016, where each country described and identified what it felt were the most important lessons from its polio work. There were meetings organized in Washington, DC; New York City; and Baltimore in September 2017 to discuss polio lessons and share these with those working in other sectors. In February 2018, MCSP brought together a group of agencies with USAID-funded polio projects in Washington, DC, to identify priority lessons, capture them in a shared document, and develop and implement a joint dissemination plan. This meeting resulted in Word of Mouth, described in the direct publication section above. This document has been widely disseminated through partner networks on its polio website, through MCSP's networks, and by other agencies, such as CORE Group. Other meetings have also been held, such as one in Washington, DC, in October 2018, which brought together the same group of USAID-funded agencies with UNICEF headquarters polio staff to discuss emerging issues within the polio program to better understand priorities and areas of mutual interest going forward.

Participation in Major Communication Events

MCSP provided support to the secretariat of the SBCC Summit held in Nusa Dua in April 2018. Being so closely involved in the summit's development allowed MCSP to establish a significant polio communication presence at the summit through a keynote speaker, panels, and several side sessions. This provided a platform to share polio communication experience and lessons with a wide audience of people and organizations committed to SBCC. See, for instance, this special edition of The Drum Beat: Polio Perspectives from the SBCC Summit.

Sharing Research Findings and Methodologies

The research methodology used for Perceptions of Influence: Understanding Attitudes to Polio Vaccination and Immunization in Northern Nigeria was a variant of qualitative comparative analysis, which has the potential to be used more widely in health research. MCSP held a training session in Abuja to introduce this methodology to the research department of Nigeria's NPHCDA in November 2014, presented it during a workshop on communication research methodologies hosted by MCSP and BBC Media Action in London in March 2015, and again presented it in a workshop hosted by MCSP and USAID in Washington, DC, in May 2015.

The methodology developed for the social media work in Ukraine used an experimental but successful approach to social media mapping to discover platforms where communities of parents, health and education professionals, and other civil society actors naturally gather. This methodology also has the potential to be more widely used for social media research in other sectors. MCSP held two workshops in May 2017 describing these methods for social media analysis in Washington, DC (hosted by MCSP and USAID), and in New York City (hosted by UNICEF), and presented in a panel at the Global Vaccine and Immunization Research Forum in Bangkok in 2018. The presentation is available here.

Ukraine Roundtables

When Ukraine had an outbreak in 2015 and 2016, MCSP supported the response in two ways. One was to review and make recommendations related to social media, which is discussed in the research section above. The other was to facilitate high-level meetings designed to inform policy and deepen support among influential expatriate Ukrainians and government officials. To this end, MCSP offered support to three high-level roundtables. The first was in Washington, DC, in May 2016. MCSP provided logistical support only, as this roundtable was convened by the U.S. Ukraine Foundation and hosted by US Rep. Mary Kaptur, co-chair of the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus. It was chaired by Boris Lushniak, retired US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps rear admiral, who also served as the acting US surgeon general. The meetings resulted in an analysis of the situation and a statement recommending ways forward. This was followed by another roundtable in Kyiv at the request of the Ukrainian government, which was held in October 2016 and organized by UNICEF together with the Ministry of Health of Ukraine. Participants included Vice Prime Minister Pavlo Rozenko and Minister of Health Ulana Suprun, along with international technical experts, such as David Salisbury, chair of the Global Commission for Certification of Poliomyelitis Eradication, former director of immunization at the UK Department of Health and Social Care, and former chair of WHO's Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization. This meeting built on the roundtable held in Washington, DC, and MCSP provided ongoing support to ensure linkages between the two meetings. MCSP also presented the research findings to a final roundtable in Kyiv in July 2017 to support the government and UNICEF to incorporate them into ongoing polio communication activities.

Engaging the Network

The major focus of this element was to encourage an exchange of ideas and opinions among members of the network through editorials and blogs. Two examples of this are:

An editorial series titled Hopes and Fears, in which a number of polio thought leaders were asked to explain their hopes and fears for the polio program in 1,000 words or less. Seven editorials were contributed:

• Polio: Highest Hopes and Deepest Fears for the GPEI Based on Where It Is Now by Peter da Costa: Costa is a member of the Horn of Africa Polio TAG who has been a technical advisor on polio communication in Central Africa and Nigeria.
• Polio Eradication Hopes and Fears: What Next? by Heidi Larson and Will Schulz: Larson is an anthropologist and director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine; Will Schulz studies vaccine hesitancy and other issues of public engagement for public health as a researcher with the Vaccine Confidence Project.
• Are There Lasting Lessons from Polio Eradication for Global Health? by Sue Goldstein: Goldstein is a member of the Independent Monitoring Board of the GPEI and a past member of the Task Force on Immunization in the WHO Regional Office for Africa and the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts Working Group on Vaccine Hesitancy.
• From Polio's Small Victories to Development's Global Wins by Claire Hajaj: Hajaj is a journalist specializing in conflict, policy, and advocacy whose experience spans strategic communication, international policy, national development, and humanitarian operations.
• Putting America First Means Eradicating Polio by Nellie Bristol: Bristol is a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Global Health Policy Center.
• Seeing What We Don't See: An Experience of Supportive Supervision by Ellen Coates: Coates is a public health professional who is former director of the CORE Group Polio Project and member of several recent outbreak response assessment teams in Lao PDR and Madagascar.
• Hope and Momentum in Ukraine by Judy Twigg: Twigg is a professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she teaches courses on global health, international political economy, international relations, and Russian politics.

Another example is a series of interviews done following the roundtables on Ukraine held in Washington, DC, and Kyiv, with several of the participants to capture different perspectives on the issues behind Ukraine's poor immunization coverage:

• Judyth Twigg Interview: Technical Roundtable on Immunization and Polio Eradication in Ukraine
  Twigg is a professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University and a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
• Boris Lushniak Interview: Technical Roundtable on Immunization and Polio Eradication in Ukraine
  Lushniak is a retired US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps rear admiral who also served as the acting US surgeon general.
• Patrick M. O'Connor Interview: Technical Roundtable on Immunization and Polio Eradication in Ukraine
  O'Connor is the team lead (accelerated disease control, vaccine preventable diseases, and immunization) at WHO.
• David Salisbury Interview: Technical Roundtable on Immunization and Polio Eradication in Ukraine
  Salisbury is the chair of the Global Commission for Certification of Poliomyelitis Eradication, former director of immunization at the UK Department of Health and Social Care, and former chair of WHO's Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization.

There are many other examples of engaging the network, including 36 other editorials, which can be viewed at this link, identifying and recruiting consultants with a wide range of specialized backgrounds, sourcing reviewers for papers, and bringing together groups to analyze specific problems, such as the development of global communication indicators for polio.

Polio Network Website

The Polio Network website is a platform to store summarized knowledge¹ so that it can be sourced and shared in real time. It also has a range of interactive features that allow users to join discussion groups, subscribe to newsletters, and contact each other directly. The polio work done before MCSP meant that the website already had over 1,300 knowledge summaries on a robust content management platform with good usage figures for a specialized website. MCSP has expanded that knowledge, updated the content management software, and continued to increase website use. Nearly 700 knowledge summaries have been added since July 2014. The platform has been regularly updated to keep up with requirements for a user-friendly online experience as speeds, capabilities, and user expectations evolve. The website itself has been reorganized more than once to continue to be easily searchable and to reflect changing priority areas for polio eradication. It has been accessed by an average of 68 users per day and has hosted more than 268,000 page views over the duration of MCSP. Many of those accessing the platform are from polio-endemic countries (for example, 8,766 user sessions from Nigeria) and from cities where the headquarters of spearheading polio partners are located (for example, 3,361 user sessions from New York). This collection of polio communication knowledge summaries is now one of the largest in the world and will continue to be a source of polio knowledge for researchers and practitioners into the future.

Newsletters

As knowledge summaries are posted to the website, they are disseminated through two newsletters—one to The Polio Network, and the other to the wider communication network. Immunisation, Vaccines and Polio: DB Click is published once every 2 months; it began with a subscriber base of 11,548 in July 2014 and grew to 13,354 by May 2019. It highlights a range of knowledge recently posted on The Polio Network website and serves as a prompt to attract network members to explore other knowledge on the website. MCSP has published 25 of these since July 2014. The more widely distributed newsletter is The Drum Beat. This has a subscriber base of over 47,000 who work on communication across many development sectors. Eighteen special polio-focused editions of The Drum Beat have been published on topics ranging from vaccine hesitancy and USAID-funded polio lessons to editorials and opinion and community engagement.

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¹ MCSP editorial staff members identify relevant knowledge in the form of reports, research papers, program descriptions, opinion, technical documents, monitoring and evaluation reports, and reports from oversight bodies, such as the polio Independent Monitoring Board and TAGs. These documents are summarized to make them easier to review quickly—called knowledge summaries—with links to the full document and author.

Editor's note: Above is part of an end-of-project report on the Maternal and Child Survival Program (MCSP)'s work as part of a global 5-year cooperative agreement funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to support the global effort to eradicate poliomyelitis by providing expertise, research, and knowledge dissemination in communication. The full table of contents is here.

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