Marrying Empathy and Science to Spread Impact

Although our team specializes in rigorous evaluation of health programs, but we also love to design new interventions. Check out our Stanford Social Innovation Review article about the creation of more effective, equitable, and scalable sexual and reproductive health programs with design thinking and behavioral science: "Mapping design-thinking insights to evidence-based behavioral principles can reveal strengths and weaknesses in service design..... This worked well in our past work to drive HIV treatment adherence using patient-centered approaches, and we’ve continued to employ this approach to broader, market-blocking norms." Intrigued? Check out the full article to learn how to design for scale, thereby maximizing impact and access for vulnerable groups. Congrats to our amazing team that’s helped us build this model over many projects and years!

Malkia Klabu (“Queen Club”) is a loyalty program designed with and for young women (like this young woman from Shinyanga, who is on our Youth Advisory Board) to address multiple structural and psychological barriers to accessing sensitive health pro…

Malkia Klabu (“Queen Club”) is a loyalty program designed with and for young women (like this young woman from Shinyanga, who is on our Youth Advisory Board) to address multiple structural and psychological barriers to accessing sensitive health products. (Photo by Lauren Hunter)

Launch of AmbassADDOrs for Health

Adolescent girls and young women (ages 15-24) in sub-Saharan Africa face the dual threats of HIV infection and unintended pregnancy that severely undermine their long-term wellbeing. However, despite the urgent need to reach young women with sexual and reproductive health services, health systems are often ill equipped to overcome the numerous barriers to health care services faced by young women. Our team, including Dr. Jenny Liu (UCSF), Dr. Sue Napierala (RTI International), and Dr. Prosper Njau (Health for a Prosperous Nation), is embarking on a new NIH-funded project to address this need in Tanzania. 

We will develop 'girl-friendly' drug shops (known as Accredited Drug Dispensing Outlets, or ADDOs, in Tanzania) as a venue where young women can access HIV prevention services and contraception. The motivation for this approach is the growing recognition that drug shops, which are widely located in urban and rural settings, can promote beneficial health behaviors, bridge gaps in health services, and mitigate health workforce shortages. Similar to our previous projects, we will use human centered design to select and refine the best solutions from behavioral economics to optimize the girl-friendly approach. 

We will evaluate these approaches in a pilot study in 20 drug girl-friendly drug shops.  We will measure whether there is demand for contraception and HIV self-tests and whether drug shops are a suitable venue for their distribution. We will also provide linkages to local health care providers in case a young woman requires a clinical evaluation (e.g., for HIV infection). Our long term goal is to provide guidance to the government and scientific community about whether community-based distribution of HIV testing at drug shops is an effective strategy for decreasing the incidence of HIV and unintended pregnancies among girls and young women. Read more about the NIH-funded project here.