The pandemic has reached all corners of the globe, hitting the world’s most vulnerable populations hardest. India and Bangladesh were no exception. Fortunately, the team at Noora Health saw the crisis coming and took swift action.
In a matter of months, Noora Health, supported by an emergency grant from the Skoll Foundation and other partners, developed and delivered a wide range of COVID-19 products and services currently being used by governments, development sector organizations, healthcare professionals, and community leaders in India and Bangladesh. They began their COVID-19 response through a needs-finding study that spanned more than 6000 respondents across multiple states.
Given this research, they adapted to the need of the hour, leveraging their expertise in health behavior change to create a set of programs to drive better health outcomes at home. The result is a comprehensive platform of critical information, and skills-based, behavior change focused training that empowers front line workers, supports families, and strengthens health systems.
Noora Health provided their partners with high impact behavior change content that spans 14 regional languages and 15 topics, including social distancing, precautions for the elderly and new mothers, as well as topics to address stigma and misinformation. Despite the time pressures of the pandemic, their COVID-19 content was rigorously tested and refined to support behavior change where it mattered most: emphasizing and reiterating key messages (e.g. consistent mask-wearing), that were customized for context, culture, region, and language. In addition to their existing partnerships with state and municipal governments, MyGov (the Indian Government’s national platform for citizen participation in governance), and the Government of Bangladesh’s Directorate General of Health Services actively disseminates Noora Health’s materials.
Early on, the organization understood that passively disseminating content would only go so far. To better enable the last mile distribution of key information, Noora Health created an online training platform and supported more than 4,500 frontline workers across the country with engaging training. These frontline workers came from a variety of Govt agencies, NGOs, and social enterprises. Noora continues to support these frontline workers, using their COVID-19 behavior change framework to pass on the latest guidelines to their communities.
During this pandemic digital tools like WhatsApp have become life-lines for locked-down populations, in response Noora (supported by Praekelt and Turn.io), has set up 3 services to support health systems: 1) Directorate General of Health Services, Govt of Bangladesh COVID-19 Chatbot, 2) A healthcare worker specific Chatbot, and 3) a service that provides information and access to two way communication for new mothers on best practices for antenatal and postnatal care.
Globally, healthcare systems are increasingly overburdened in providing care, with limited capacity to meet the additional health needs caused by COVID-19. The rapid delivery and adaptation of evidence-based health interventions is more critical now than ever. Noora therefore leveraged their core mission of engaging and training family caregivers of patients, and launched in partnership with government agencies, an official family caregiver training program for those COVID-19 patients isolating at home. This program combines relevant content and live support from Noora’s team of empathetic tele-trainers, and WhatsApp / IVRS/ SMS platforms to follow up with families at home (an example can be found here). While the largest burden of care falls on families during this time, Noora has been adapting their approach to their long-standing health-facility focused Care Companion Program to now support people directly in their homes.
The impact has been impressive. Noora Health’s comprehensive COVID-19 response has reached over 13 million people through over 70 partner organizations in India and Bangladesh.
While the recent positive news of vaccine development adds some optimism in an otherwise challenging year, Noora continues to focus on supporting its communities to prevent virus transmission, support COVID-19 patients, and looks ahead to support the acceptance, and uptake of a vaccine when ready for roll-out in South Asia.
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