A ROADMAP TO better decision Making

Local people on the ground are rarely consulted about global health interventions intended to serve their communities. This can result in lower take-up and missed opportunities.

We believe that by designing health interventions in active collaboration with the community,  projects stand a greater chance of success.

By giving people agency over their own health resources, the finished project may be more widely and enduringly adopted by the community.

This also gives global health specialists an opportunity to incorporate existing health resources into their plans - resources which may be effective, but informal or hard to identify.

To this end, Stema is developing a toolkit to enable global health professionals to run projects in collaboration with local communities, resulting in faster, more effective and longer lasting impact.

The toolkit is now in beta testing - if you would like your community or field location to participate, please contact us.

Most communities in low-resource settings suffer from a lack of information.

Data collection is expensive, burdensome, not fit-for-purpose, and is not accessible by communities themselves.

Rich local knowledge may exist, but it is typically overlooked as it doesn’t translate into accepted development indicators.

As a result, local people are disempowered, and global health decision-makers and innovators lack the data they need to make wise investments or to measure success.

Stema is working on innovations in data science that will allow people on the ground to crowdsource information about community health. Our most advanced project is a form of computer vision that will use smartphone photography to accurately predict health metrics, making data collection rapid, accessible and translatable to policymakers.

How can you know whether it will be more effective for a community to dig a well or build a mobile clinic?

Or suppose you are an or innovator with an exciting new technology - how can you know the most impactful place to deploy it? And how can you convince donors, investors or other partners that you're correct?

Decision-makers in global health face a thorny challenge: choosing the intervention that will have the greatest and most enduring impact, in the context of a specific community. What works best in one location may not be the right choice for another. Sustainable, effective solutions come about because the entire community system is understood.

Stema is building a decision support system, to assist decision-makers in choosing the most effective health interventions for a specific context. Drawing upon data gathered from similar communities, mathematical modelling can be used to simulate the impact of competing interventions, and enhance the effectiveness of stakeholders at every level – from community members to innovators, NGOs and government officials.