CommunityFirst MSF TIC: Co-designing Humanitarian Health Strategies with Communities
The joint initiative with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) aims to shift the paradigm of traditional top-down humanitarian assistance. Through co-design, the project seeks to center communities on health crisis responses. The goal is to create a community-inclusive model adaptable to diverse contexts within the MSF movement
Vulnerabilized communities around the world are facing intersecting and complex crises that will continue for decades to come. Despite increased funding and reach, today's humanitarian system is unable to respond to the growing needs of people facing crisis.
Humanitarians must engage crisis-affected people as active agents in health response
Creating tools for co-designing humanitarian programs
The CommunityFirst framework is an approach for co-designing humanitarian responses with the community.
It was developed by SeeChange in cooperation with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams and communities in Sierra Leone, Venezuela, and Peru, and is inspired by community-based participatory action research.
Download the CommunityFirst Framework
The participatory monitoring, evaluation, accountability, and learning (PMEAL) toolkit provides MSF staff with various practical, participatory tools to engage communities in designing, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating programmes. Actively consulting and seeking feedback from patients and their communities also increases accountability and transparency of the work MSF is doing.
The toolkit accompanies the CommunityFirst Framework.
If you want to learn more about how you can integrate this community-centered approach into your organization's work, please get in touch
Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation in diverse contexts
The CommunityFirst approach has been piloted in partnership with MSF teams and communities in diverse humanitarian contexts, such as complex emergencies, sexual and gender-based violence, and other situations of violence.
The initiative seeks to apply a Participatory Planning, Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning process (PMEAL), driven by the community’s perceptions of health and progress.
Key Impacts of our work
Humanitarian programs align with communities' local solutions and health analyses
Community members lead impactful activities for health and wellbeing
Humanitarian project teams collaborate with communities to co-design projects and develop skills
Humanitarian organizations have a model to standardize co-design as a key element of their community engagement practices
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