JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Infectious diseases represent a public health challenge worldwide, especially for developing countries which face most of their impact. Participatory and co-design methods have been used in infectious diseases prevention and control to better respond to local contexts and targeted populations, raise awareness and increase knowledge, reduce costs, ensure access to healthcare and develop local ownership of the community interventions.

Objective:

The objective of this article is to show the co-design process and to evaluate the capacity building of an education program for the prevention and control of infectious diseases which used participatory visual methods culturally adapted to ethnic communities and rural contexts in Colombia.

Methods:

The evaluation of the program included qualitative data collection to inquire about participants’ perception in terms of the process and the results of co-designing the program and quantitative data collection to evaluate knowledge acquisition. Content analysis was applied for the qualitative data and the quantitative data that resulted from the multiple-choice questionnaires were pooled and quantitatively coded, and a quantitative analysis was developed.

Results:

The results of the co-design process were twelve workshops that were co-designed with the team of community leaders, four workshops for each of the three diseases: cutaneous leishmaniasis, malaria and tuberculosis, and the co-creation of three audiovisual products: an animation about malaria, a comic book about cutaneous leishmaniasis, and a puppet show about tuberculosis. The quantitative evaluation showed positive results regarding knowledge acquisition by participants, and the qualitative evaluation showed positive results in terms of the perception that the participants had about the methodology used and the results of the co-design process. 

Conclusions:

The co-design process was driven by three key factors: active community participation at every stage, knowledge exchange between multidisciplinary technical expertise and practical local knowledge, and the use of innovative, culturally adapted pedagogical tools tailored to the rural context and population. This co-design process proved to be an effective method for meaningful capacity building among vulnerable populations in complex settings, contributing significantly to the improvement of infectious diseases prevention and control.