Health Equity

Social or economic status can potentially have a greater influence on a person’s health than the availability of healthcare. Access to clean water, social support, education, income, food security and housing dramatically affect our level of exposure and resilience to threats and diseases, our health-related behaviours, and our ability to access health services. There is an unfair and unavoidable difference in health status between rich and poor countries. Globally, the lower the socioeconomic position of a country, the worse the health of its citizens. In fact, social determinants are estimated to account for 30-55% of an individual’s health status. These inequalities in social determinants however also exist within countries and it is the poorest and most vulnerable that are worse affected.

Our Health Equity practice aims to reach society’s most vulnerable by tackling structural inequities around nutrition, livelihoods, sexual & reproductive health, maternal & newborn health, and family planning.

Ensuring we spotlight and tackle pervasive inequalities around gender and inclusion within these thematic areas will always be central our work.

We specialise in designing innovative, evidence-based technical programmes that impact vulnerable young girls, pregnant women, infants & children, parents & carers and youth, refugees and people living in conflict affected areas.

• Initiating Multi-Sectoral Coalitions: Our commitment to working within systems means we are passionate about building coalitions and consensus. We use political economy and stakeholder analyses to understand influencers, motivations and histories within a given context before we begin project work. Following our analyses, we develop partnership frameworks and agreements to foster open communication, commitments, action and accountability.
• Tackling social norms to drive change: We use a range of evidence-based approaches such as mass media campaigns, social influencers, social media, community radio, community dialogue, and champion advocates to drive social change. We develop public dialogues and create forums for broad debate and discussion within communities around key public health issues to disrupt old ways of thinking.
• Trigger, nudge and sustain behaviour change: Using a people-centred approach and drawing on a range of behavioural economics and nudge theories we design participatory behaviour change projects. Our target groups include carers, youth or health professionals and our projects employ tactics like gamification or digital dialogue to help individuals change behaviour around food, contraception, substance abuse, hand washing, providing respectful care, etc.
• Demand Creation: within the context of a wider program we create demand for health services or health related products using social marketing techniques and other approaches informed by behavioural insights.
• Research & Analysis: We conduct primary field research, surveys and deep dive data analysis to help our clients and host governments understand where and for whom inequities. Unpacking inequity clustering, particularly amongst the most vulnerable, allow us to apply these insights and support our clients to design