Demand Creation for Health Services - Somali Advocates for Health and Nutrition (SAHAN) Programme

Description

PSI is supporting Ministries of Health to implement the Demand Creation for Health Services - Somali Advocates for Health and Nutrition (SAHAN) programme - from July 2016 to March 2021. SAHAN is a component of DFID’s Somali Health and Nutrition (SHINE) programme. The aim under this programme is to identify and build a body of evidence for prototypes (interventions) demonstrated to increase access to and utilisation of reproductive, nutrition, child, and maternal health services and to promote healthy behaviour change. The program is using an adaptive, evidence-based, participatory approach to better understand the persistent barriers to uptake of health services and healthy behaviours and develop and test innovations in demand creation that target factors which influence individual behaviour to improve the health of Somali women of reproductive age (WRA) and children under-5. Using the socio-ecological model as a framework, these factors are understood to exist at and interplay between the individual, interpersonal, community, organizational and policy levels. Fundamentally this programme is re-envisioning how “demand creation” is done, using cutting-edge methods. At the end, this programme is intended to have developed evidence-based, user-informed and tested interventions to drive demand for health services (in both the public and private sectors) and/or change healthy behaviours of women and caregivers of children under-5, packaged and ready to be implemented at scale with clear recommendations for contextual adaptations. In parallel, the programme will have built local capacity to develop and implement innovative behaviour change interventions using human-centered approaches, strengthened the learning environment across the health sector through promoting information sharing and collaboration.

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