Coordination Mechanisms for Integrated Health Campaigns: A Descriptive Review

Integrated health campaigns can be more efficient and effective than vertical campaigns in their use of human and financial resources to achieve health outcomes. Effective coordination of integrated campaigns is crucial for enhancing campaign quality of service delivery, outcomes, and reaching target populations. Coordination mechanisms can be more complex for integrated campaigns, however, especially related to planning and mobilizing resources across programs.

To address the complexity of campaign integration, the Health Campaign Effectiveness Coalition (HCE) conducted case studies to identify promising practices for integrating campaigns and to inform development of related guidelines and tools. Based on these studies, HCE identified a key promising practice: Form a coordinating body to oversee campaign integration and collaborate with regional/local coordination bodies [1]. For this reason, HCE’s Leadership Team prioritized a review of integrated campaign coordination mechanisms and development of a corresponding tool on coordination. This report provides background information for developing the tool, with an overview of models of integrated campaign coordination mechanisms and promising practices in establishing and implementing them.

HCE reviewed published and gray literature on both vertical and integrated health campaign coordination. Key informant interviews were then conducted with six program partners in five countries that had integrated health campaigns in HCE’s focus intervention areas—vaccinations, malaria prevention, neglected tropical diseases, and vitamin A supplementation. The interviews focused on respondents’ experiences and lessons in coordinating the integrated campaigns in their countries.

This report documents the main characteristics of coordination structures and the players responsible for convening stakeholders and implementing integrated health campaigns in diverse global settings, with a focus on key informant experiences in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Nepal, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. It further highlights enablers, barriers, and recommendations for understanding successful integrated campaign coordination bodies.

The findings highlight a need to establish an overarching national leadership team with subcommittees focused on technical coordination, administration, communications, monitoring and evaluation (including data collection and digitalization), and subnational coordination structures at regional, provincial, district, and community levels. Enablers of integrated coordination included strong government support, participation of diverse partners and donors, and clear mandates provided to coordination teams. Donor restrictions on use of funds along with complex accounting and reporting requirements by individual donors were identified as barriers to such coordination, along with challenges in coordinating additional training for health workers to cover all health interventions and disruptions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Recommendations are made for more in-depth study of integrated campaign coordination mechanisms, including their operation in the context of complex operating environments, stakeholder analysis and mapping, committee membership, private-public partnership, functions of the technical coordination sub-groups including microplanning, and community participation in the national campaign coordination process.