WHY DESIGN IN GLOBAL HEALTH?
Significant progress has been made in global health. Child and maternal mortality are declining, and life expectancy is on the rise. However, as the Sustainable Development Goals illustrate, more progress is needed. By improving current practices and developing innovative solutions, we can build upon today’s momentum and accelerate progress.
Global health practitioners have asked for guidance to increase the understanding, use, and value of design as an approach to addressing global health challenges. We recognize that there may be uncertainty around the design approach, thus we have created a set of resources to clarify its potential based on questions we’ve heard from global health practitioners.
Image courtesy of Catapult Design
Image courtesy of Catapult Design
HOW CAN DESIGN CONTRIBUTE TO GLOBAL HEALTH?
Design has often been used as a spark or an ingredient to ‘fix’ a product or service. Its impact would be greater if design was incorporated from the start in a program cycle. To this end, in 2017 the United States Agency for International Development’s Center for Innovation and Impact and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation first convened a group of global health experts and designers to reflect on the application of design in global health.
That first group has grown, and as a wider community has worked together, to co-create a vision and roadmap to amplify the impact of design in global health by increasing its understanding, use and value.
WHO IS THIS GUIDE FOR?
We co-created the resources available on this website in conversation with representatives from the global health community. Five types of users (or profiles) emerged that represent the different stages of a global health practitioner in his/her path towards adoption and implementation of design in his/her work. Which of the profiles do you fit into?
