For several years the C2R-CD project has been building a picture of diarrhoeal disease along Ghana’s coast, monthly records from health facilities, going back to 2012, linked to the climate conditions around them. The result is a risk model and more than six hundred facility-level trend plots covering twenty-nine coastal districts.
The difficulty is that this evidence has largely stayed with researchers. A district health team cannot act on a model held at Legon.
Diarrhoea and Actionable Tools for Authorities – Community Awareness, Resilience and Engagement (DATA-CARE) exists to close that gap. Funded by the DANIDA Fellowship Centre and hosted at the Institute for Environment and Sanitation Studies, University of Ghana, it is a science engagement project rather than research one. No new data is being collected. The work is translation: taking evidence that already exists and putting it where decisions are made.
It runs along three lines. The first equips Ghana Health Service officers and district health teams with tools to read diarrhoea patterns, a decision-support template, an evidence-to-action brief, a policy brief and an infographic. The second trains the Health Information Officers who manage DHIMS2 data, so they can produce and interpret their own district trends long after the project closes. The third brings the public into the conversation through community radio, short films and storytelling in local languages.
DATA-CARE builds on C-CARE, an earlier initiative that used radio and drama to raise awareness along the coast. DATA-CARE aims to create capability.
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