Building global capacity for COVID-19 vaccination through interactive virtual learning.

BACKGROUND: To support the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccine, the World Health Organization and its partners developed an interactive virtual learning initiative through which vaccination stakeholders could receive the latest guidance, ask questions, and share their experiences. This initiative, implemented between 9 February 2021 and 15 June 2021, included virtual engagement between technical experts and participants during a 15-session interactive webinar series as well as web and text-messaging discussions in English and French. METHODS: This article uses a mixed-methods approach to analyze survey data collected following each webinar and a post-series survey conducted after the series had concluded. Participant data were tracked for each session, and feedback surveys were conducted after each session to gauge experience quality and content usability. Chi-square tests were used to compare results across professions (health workers, public health practitioners, and others). RESULTS: The COVID-19 Vaccination: Building Global Capacity webinar series reached participants in 179 countries or 93% of the WHO Member States; 75% of participants were from low- and middle-income countries. More than 60% of participants reported using the resources provided during the sessions, and 47% reported sharing these resources with colleagues. More than 79% of participants stated that this initiative significantly improved their confidence in preparing for and rolling out COVID-19 vaccinations; an additional 20% stated that the initiative "somewhat" improved their confidence. In the post-series survey, 70% of participants reported that they will "definitely use" the knowledge derived from this learning series in their work; an additional 20% will "probably use" and 9% would "possibly use" this knowledge in their work. CONCLUSION: The COVID-19 Vaccination: Building Global Capacity learning initiative used a digital model of dynamic, interactive learning at scale. The initiative enhanced WHO's ability to disseminate knowledge, provide normative guidance, and share best practices to COVID-19 vaccination stakeholders in real time. This approach allowed WHO to hear the information needs of stakeholders and respond by developing guidance, tools, and training to support COVID-19 vaccine introduction. WHO and its partners can learn from this capacity-building experience and apply best practices for digital interactive learning to other health programs moving forward.

Sharing lessons learned from COVID-19 vaccine introductions: a global community forum for countries.

To optimize the efficient introduction and deployment of COVID-19 vaccines across the globe during the COVID-19 pandemic, in April 2021 WHO launched a new process and tools for countries to rapidly review the early phase of countries' COVID-19 vaccine introduction. This methodology is called the COVID-19 vaccination intra-action review, also known as mini COVID-19 vaccine post-introduction evaluation (mini-cPIE). As of November 2022, 46 mini-cPIEs had been conducted. In collaboration with Project ECHO, WHO convened and facilitated real-time experience sharing and peer-learning among countries following their mini-cPIEs through a virtual global real-time learning forum. This five-session clinic series was attended by 736 participants from 129 countries. Based on post-session feedback surveys, when asked about the utility of the sessions, half of the participants said that sessions led them to review national guidelines and protocols or make other changes to their health systems. The post-series survey sent following the end of the clinic series showed that at least eight countries subsequently conducted a mini-cPIE after participating in the clinics, and participants from at least nine countries indicated the experience shared by peer countries on the clinic largely benefited their COVID-19 vaccine introduction and deployment. In this article, we highlight the benefits and importance of creating a global experience-sharing forum for countries to connect and share pertinent learnings in real-time during an international public health emergency. Moving forward, it is critical to foster a culture of individual and collective learning within and between countries during public health emergencies, with WHO playing an important convening role.

Fruitful exchanges: social networks and food resources amidst change.

BACKGROUND: The Amazon region of Brazil is known both for its significant biological and cultural diversity. It is also a region, like many parts of the country, marked by food insecurity, even amongst its rural agricultural populations. In a novel approach, this paper addresses the networks of exchanges of local food and their relationship to the agrobiodiversity of traditional riverine peoples' (ribeirinho) households in the Central Amazon. Methodologically, it involves mapping the social networks and affinities between households, inventories of known species, and, finally, statistical tests of the relationships between network and subsequent agrobiodiversity. RESULTS: The diversity per area of each land type where food cultivation or management takes place shows how home gardens, fields and orchards are areas of higher diversity and intense cultivation compared to fallow areas. Our findings, however, indicate that a household's income does appear to be strongly associated with the total agrobiodiversity across cultivation areas. In addition, a household's agrobiodiversity is significantly associated with the frequency and intensity of food exchanges between households. CONCLUSIONS: Agrobiodiversity cannot be considered separate from the breadth of activities focused on sustenance and yields from the cash economy, which riverine people engage in daily. It seems to be connected to quotidian social interactions and exchanges in both predictable and occasionally subtler ways. Those brokers who serve as prominent actors in rural communities may not always be the most productive or in possession of the largest landholdings, although in some cases they are. Their proclivity for cultivating and harvesting a wide diversity of produce may be equally important if not more so. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40066-021-00342-5.