Community involvement for a people-centred NCD response

In Ghana, the ground-up approach to meaningful involvement led to the recognition of the needs of people with lived experience and their communities. By 2020, meaningful involvement was recognised as an essential component of delivering people-centred NCD and Universal Health Care (UHC) services.

Between 2020-2022, GhNCDA - informed by its network of people living with NCDs - provided inputs to the National Policy & Strategic Plan for the Prevention and Control of NCDs (2022-2026) that aimed to strengthen the health system for NCD prevention and control, reduce exposure to NCD risk factors, strengthen multisectoral collaboration and ensure sustainable funding mechanisms.

Alongside the national level efforts, GhNCDA has supported engagement of communities in strengthening primary health care services in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Ghana Health Service. The community scorecard, developed by Ghana Health Service in 2018, was leveraged to integrate NCDs into the process. This allowed people living with NCDs and civil society to contribute constructively towards improving access to quality, affordable and timely NCD services at the primary healthcare level.

The alliance accords high importance to the role of civil society in demonstrating the value of lived experience and community, calling this the primary enabling factor for the operationalization of meaningful involvement.

In 2022, Ghana’s nine-indicator community scorecard was adopted to assess the quality of NCD services in two pilot districts by trained Community Health Management Committees (CHMCs) made up of people with lived experience.

The outcomes were published in a community-led monitoring report and uploaded to the web-based scorecard action tracker owned by the Ghana Health Service as part of building a robust digital health information system. A review was undertaken in 2023 to assess the effectiveness of the data collected by CHMCs, which identified areas for improving NCD services at the community level in Ghana and recommended solutions to addressing challenges.

"I want to see an intentional approach to meaningful involvement, which will help bridge the gap in NCD financing. We have come a long way but there is a longer way to go. Policy-making processes can be fully inclusive only when the role of people with lived experience and communities is sustained, formally recognised, regarded as a form of technical expertise and spans across the lifespan of a policy or programme.”

Christopher Agbega, lived experience advocate, GhNCDA