Although much progress has been made in the fight against HIV/AIDS, we still have more work and learning to do.

We have learned over the last decade that HIV prevention efforts must be targeted. Even in countries where there is a general epidemic, interventions for key populations are critical and could have a significant impact on the epidemic as a whole.[1]

For this reason, it’s important to learn more about programming best practices for key populations as well as develop robust systems to effectively monitor and evaluate these programs.

If you are interested in learning more, check out two new eLearning courses on key populations: Designing HIV Prevention Programs for Key Populations and M&E Guidelines for Sex Workers, Men Who Have Sex With Men, & Transgender Populations-National Level.

The Designing HIV Prevention Programs for Key Populations course on the Global Health eLearning Center

The Designing HIV Prevention Programs for Key Populations course provides field staff and country implementing partners with best practices in designing and implementing a comprehensive package of HIV services that meet the specific needs and circumstances of different population sub-groups.

Key populations are distinct sub-groups within the general population who are at higher risk of exposure to HIV, who engage in highly stigmatized behaviors and who are often marginalized in their own societies and thus have reduced access to health care and other public services.

At the Global Health Knowledge Management Share Fair, Stacey Young from USAID's Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning discussed the importance of local knowledge, and how the curated knowledge base needs be be accessible to practitioners in the field.

This post originally appeared on the Global Health Knowledge Collaborative (GHKC) Blog. Basil Safi presented the Strategies Against Flu Emergence (SAFE) program at last month's Global Health Knowledge Management Share Fair, and how it's not always necessary to create a new tool to manage knowledge. Using Indonesia as an example, he illustrated how galvanizing a local team to optimize an existing tool can make life-saving knowledge accessible to those who need it most.

Stacey Young, Senior Learning Advisor at USAID's Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning, remarked that the knowledge base needs to be more than accessible to local partners, it needs to be created at the field level. 

Strategies Against Flu Emergence (SAFE) is a program created to support USAID/Indonesia’s Avian and Pandemic Influenza (API) Program and the Government of Indonesia’s National Strategy for Avian Influenza (AI) Control and Preparedness for Human Pandemic Influenza. In addition to a range of prevention activities at the local level, the program uses state of the art KM and social media tools to promote public-private partnerships, good poultry farming practices, improved biosecurity and hygiene behaviors at farms and markets, and improved care-seeking behavior for AI. 

During the Global Health Knowledge Collaborative's Knowledge Management Share Fair on April 16th in Washington, DC, I discussed that a key objective of the SAFE program was to facilitate coordination among partners by sharing important health information that is targeted for program managers and other decision-makers. In order to achieve this, SAFE taps into the potential of digital technology and create an online platform as a tool to share knowledge and communicate experiences for AI and Pandemic Influenza Programs in Indonesia.  

Since it launched, this collection of Avian & Pandemic Influenza resources has been one of K4Health's most popular online toolkits.

In its process, SAFE did not wish to create a new tool, but rather to optimize the already existing online platform under the USAID-funded Knowledge for Health (K4Health) project led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Communication Programs. In this endeavor, Indonesia has become a pioneer in which documents on Avian Influenza and Pandemic Influenza are carefully selected, stored, and shared among users. No less than 160 documents have populated the sites from different organizations in both Bahasa and English, and as SAFE is entering its final months, it is ensuring the continuation of the process by formally handing over the eToolkit to a KM technical advisory group made up of government and local NGO members. Representatives of these institutions will be granted special access to upload their own resources as they become available, so that the toolkit remains a living and dynamic platform through which all stakeholders can share the latest and most important information.  In February 2013, this eToolkit was the 8^thmost visited toolkit within all the K4Health online toolkit resources and continues to receive a high degree of traffic each month, with the average visitor reading 3.4 resources per visit. 

Communities of practice benefit most when skilled facilitators encourage peer-to-peer learning, versus lecture-style dissemination. This image was created at the Global Health Knowledge Management Share Fair: Challenges and Opportunities by the Value Web as part of the graphic facilitation Knowledge Wall.

Originally appearing on the Global Health Knowledge Collaborative (GHKC) Blog, this post by Kate Fatta of URC explains the emphasis the USAID ASSIST Project puts on small group discussions for meaningful exchange of tacit knowledge. 

Last month's Global Health Knowledge Management Share Fair elicited a similar sentiment: Communities of practice benefit when a skilled facilitator encourages peer-to-peer learning over lecture-style dissemination, and the importance of giving people a moment to think before they are asked to speak in a group.

The Share Fair utilized small group discussions, along with peer assists and other knowledge management and exchange techniques, to catalyze conversations about challenges and opportunities in knowledge management for global health and international development.

Working with facility-based teams of health workers in knowledge management on the USAID Applying Science to Strengthen and Improve Systems Project (ASSIST) and its predecessor, the USAID Health Care Improvement Project (HCI), my colleagues and I have come to recognize the importance of using conversational, small group techniques to draw out tacit – “how to” – knowledge and provide opportunities for meaningful sharing between people.

On ASSIST we work with many teams in multiple countries to improve the quality of the services they provide – whether they are providing anti-retroviral treatment to patients or ante-natal care to pregnant women. For example, one of the activities we are working on in Uganda is to integrate nutrition, assessment, counseling, and support (NACS) services with prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) services in 22 sites in six districts. At the 22 sites, there are teams of service providers working to make this happen. While they are working on it, they are generating a lot of learning and new knowledge about this work and our challenge is to provide them with opportunities to come together and meaningfully share and learn from one another. We have already been doing this on HCI in the form of learning sessions, or meetings in which teams working on a specific activity are brought together to share what they have been doing, but in the past, we have often conducted those meetings in a very didactic, one person speaks/everyone else listens format.

Photo by Kate Fatta, URC

However, as our understanding and use of knowledge management techniques have grown, we have come to see the importance of designing meetings so that people share in small groups and integrate new knowledge in the large group. Giving people the opportunity to share in small groups and ask questions of each other allows for greater exchange of tacit knowledge than a formal presentation does. By using techniques such as storytelling, field trips, and even poster presentations in small groups, the person sharing learns more about their work by explaining it and answering questions, while the person listening gets to ask questions and probe deeper. It sets the stage that everyone has something to share and everyone has something to learn, eliminating the expert/student feeling that can happen with formal presentations.

One of my greatest “take aways” from the Global Health Knowledge Collaborative (GHKC) knowledge management (KM) Share Fair held on April 16, 2013 is that learning is such a fundamental component of KM at all levels—individual, project, organizational and beyond. Learning is facilitated by the key KM elements—people, process, and technology—and takes place at all times—before, during, and after implementation of an activity or project. Almost everything we do in KM can be tied back to learning.

We can facilitate learning in a number of ways as suggested by participants of the GHKC Share Fair:

What's Important for knowledge management in global health and international development?

• Actively listen to better understand and give voice to the communities we serve and their local knowledge
• Explicitly create a defined “learning agenda” from the outset of activities.
• Create feed back loops that take lessons learned and incorporate them into future activities
• Get the right information, to the right people at the right time
• Breakdown silos to “cross pollinate” ideas
• Put people at the center who together form a powerful collective knowledge engendering multiple perspectives
• Share failures openly so that others can learn from

Putting learning at the forefront empowers us to translate knowledge into action—making informed decisions, creating evidence-based policies, and providing programs and practice based on experiential knowledge and latest research.