In November 2022, the Wellcome Trust awarded the HARMONIZE consortium additional funding to carry out a community engagement programme that will run for four years alongside the data harmonisation project. This will support the co-learning of local climate and health impacts and the co-development of HARMONIZE digital toolkits through a series of community-based activities in Cameta (Brazil), Cajamarca (Colombia) and Iquitos (Peru). These sites were identified within HARMONIZE as vulnerable to the effects of climate change and infectious disease risk, including the Amazon rainforest, growing cities and the Andean highlands.

Through the programme, we will actively engage with local people in a two-way knowledge exchange to raise awareness and understand perceptions of infectious diseases and how changes in the climate and environment influence disease risks. We will also discuss how our proposed solutions, such as the use of drones and geotechnologies, are perceived within these communities and incorporate indigenous knowledge into our data collection strategies. Lastly, the programme seeks to increase the visibility of HARMONIZE and ensure toolkits meet the needs of the local people they intend to serve. This will go beyond informing or asking for population consent. Instead, we will enable space for dialogue between community members and the integration of local knowledge to build a collective sense of ownership over the tools being produced.

The community engagement project consists of two main strands of work. The first will establish consultative committees at each site to engage in a series of participatory activities, co-developed with local social scientists, to map community perspectives on climate and health risks and the use of drones for data collection. This will enable a safe environment for community leaders and local practitioners to share their knowledge, concerns and perceived risks as well as facilitating the co-creation and design of HARMONIZE digital toolkits. In the second strand, we will assemble a communication and dissemination package based on the needs of each community, including social media resources, infographics, audiovisual products and accessible storytelling aids, to promote HARMONIZE and local experiences of the community. These materials will be curated on the HARMONIZE website along with the web portal hosting the project’s toolkits and training materials.

Keep up to date with future HARMONIZE news stories to learn more about our community engagement activities, field campaigns and drone ethics review protocol.

Engagement activity with Mocajuba health secretariat