Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, has named the Health Campaign Effectiveness Coalition’s integration Decision Guidance Toolkit as a key resource in its latest Vaccine Funding Guidelines. The inclusion comes as part of a new guideline that any country requesting support from Gavi must seek out opportunities for integration with other campaigns, vaccine-related activities or health interventions at any stage “in order to leverage synergies and complementarity across investments, reduce adverse impact on routine immunisation, and increase cost-efficiencies.” The tool is included as a key resource in the section titled “Required considerations for countries requesting support to conduct a campaign.”
“For the first time, countries requesting financial support from Gavi to conduct a campaign are being asked to consider integration,” said Dr. Eva Bazant, Sr. Assoc. Director of Implementation Research at the Health Campaign Effectiveness Coalition. “This is a tremendous opportunity to improve campaign efficiency on a global level.”
The Decision Guidance Toolkit for People-Centered Integration of Health Campaigns was developed by the HCEC’s Campaign Integration Working Group (CIWG) to help campaign managers, officials and stakeholders determine if and when to integrate. The tool guides users through the identification, collection, and consideration of information on potential opportunities for health campaign integration.
It has four primary goals:
- Identify opportunities for initiating and continuing a discussion on campaign integration.
- Provide evidence-based criteria to help country health programs and stakeholders identify campaign interventions with strong promise for effective full or partial integration.
- Highlight the considerations and factors that are potential facilitators and barriers to such combinations in each country’s context.
- Facilitate the synthesis of global and national guidelines, standards, and criteria to inform campaign integration decisions in each country.
“This is something that we in the Campaign Integration Working Group devised in order to help people both studying and researching the issue of integration, and also implementing it,” said David Gittelman, Consultant and Technical Advisor to the HCEC. “It answers the questions of how to go about this process, what to integrate, when, and in what context.”
The tool begins with a guide on how to identify the problem and present the conversation about integration to members of ministries of health, planners, and other stakeholders.
Next, it explores methods for identifying possible campaign pairings and evaluating whether or not integrating the campaigns might be effective or not.
Finally, the tool elucidates the steps to customize the integrated plan in accordance with global, country, and/or local context. This step stresses the importance of both campaigns aligning on key elements such as the target population, timing, and in consideration of other factors.
The CIWG is currently in the process of identifying opportunities for piloting and gaining feedback on the toolkit from potential users. It is being translated into French and Spanish to expand access to the toolkit and to facilitate discussions in additional settings. Through a collaboration with Linksbridge/Sassenach, a future iteration of the toolkit will include an online, interactive interface with greater functionality. For more information, please contact campaigneffectiveness@taskforce.org.