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Today, The Global Health Network launches Mesh: a new online platform co-created by its users and aiming to improve Community Engagement with health in low and middle income countries (LMICs)
Engaging communities with research is vital to improving human health, especially in regions most effected by health inequality and disease. Good engagement ensures science can be enjoyed and experienced as part of culture, entertainment and everyday life and maximises the impact of health research to ensure research questions, methods and outcomes are relevant to the communities in question and will help to build a healthier society.
Mesh is a collaborative open-access web space which gives those involved in community engagement access the resources they need to achieve these aims. It provides an online meeting place where community engagement practitioners, researchers, health workers and others can network, share resources, find training and funding opportunities, seek expertise and discuss good practice. At present there is a lack of global collaboration in community engagement, particularly in LMICs where resources are limited. As a result innovative and successful localised community engagement projects that could be built upon in other settings, often never reach far enough for this to be the case. Mesh aims to rectify this, and to enable new partnerships and learning and contribute to building capacity in community engagement.
Mesh has been in development, with the help of hundreds of practitioners, for several month and is now ready to be used and developed by the rest of the world. We hope that you will invite colleagues to the network, start conversations and submit resources to build Mesh into a broad and invaluable tool for those working in community engagement. If you have any comments contact Georgia Bladon, Website Coordinator on: mesh@tghn.org