with the Mental Health & Psychosocial Support Network (MHPSS)

1. Transformative
Innovation to Create
Healthier Futures
by Dr. Ebele Mogo
with the Mental Health & Psychosocial Support Network (MHPSS)

2. Overview
• About me
• What makes innovating in health different?
• Case studies of adaptive and anticipatory innovation
• Cross-cutting themes from the case studies
• Various types of actors
• Approaching innovation in mental health and psychosocial support through an
ecosystem lens

3. Innovation
• Tools, processes, approaches that allow for more effective problem solving
• Create new value in orders of magnitude
• Not just creating something new (invention) but applying it resourcefully and
creatively to solve a problem e.g. mRNA vaccines and vaccination

4. About me
• Biomedical scientist and Biologist turned Dr. of Public Health
• Timely pivot given the salient challenges today e.g. inequalities, climate
change, pandemics
• My work links research with social innovation
• Move from solely clinical level to the interfacing systems

5. Examples of the interfaces

6. Entering through the lens of
human health
• What does it mean to improve someone’s
mental health sustainably in a city like Lagos?
• Intersects supportive social resources, cultural
norms and built environment infrastructure
• Complicated by your gender, socioeconomic
status, location, migration, disability, ethnicity,
religion, existing illnesses etc.
• e.g. people living with cancer need access to
mental health support, transport to get cancer
care, meals to be able to take their drugs
• Health starts to look less like treatment alone
and more like creating wellbeing systems and
economies

7. About me…
Combination of subject matter expertise in health + identifying leverage points in interfacing
systems + new models of design and delivery + testing
• e.g. testing new applications of artificial intelligence to health literacy
• e.g. identifying promising interventions in public spaces that can address chronic disease risk
factors in African cities
• e.g. developing user-centered tools for improving access to information for children with
disabilities
• e.g. testing the use of crowd-sourced data to understand access to inclusive leisure activity
resources
• e.g. building and testing evidence products to inform investments and decision making

8. Innovating in health
versus a typical product in
the market (e.g.
icecream)
• (Critical) Healthcare has inelastic demand –
when you need it, you need it even if you
can’t afford it
• There is a time gap between inputs and
outputs (exposures today can improve or
reduce your lifespan years down the line)
• There is also a disciplinary gap e.g. tobacco
sales in the trade sector can affect cancer
rates in the health sector
• The challenge of misaligned incentives.
Treating non-communicable diseases is
profitable, but we need to prevent them

9. As a result…
• Innovation to transform health cannot just be driven by willingness to pay but also
potential for impact
• Need an approach to innovation that not only responds but prevents
• Some innovations require upfront risk in other sectors e.g. investments in transport
infrastructure that create high impacts in the health sector

10. Case Studies applying an
innovation to health
challenges
Synthesizing
commonalities
Adaptive innovations:
addressing present
demands
Anticipatory innovations:
future demands
“How” to think and not
just “what” to think

11. Adaptive Innovation Case Studies In a nutshell…
Learner treatment kits to increase malaria detection (Malawi) Using schools as an entry point for detection, working with teachers as
care providers, providing first aid kits including rapid diagnostic tests for
malaria during school hours.
Improving screening for human papillomavirus through user-
friendly testing kits (Peru)
Eliminating the need for screening through self-collection kits that could
be administered at home, and collected by community health workers
who would send to the lab and send results back
Improving population coverage of SMS based health
information delivery for expectant moms (South Africa)
Provided health information and parenting support tailored to the age
of their infant or the gestational age of their fetus. Geo-located users’
experiences complaints or feedback and used to improve processes.
Technical partners built the project to be interoperable with existing
informatics systems and used SMS because of its accessibility across
handsets. Strong multisectoral partnerships between government,
service providers, donors, academia etc. which supported launch.
Government served as a champion.

12. ANTICIPATORY INNOVATION CASE STUDIES IN A NUTSHELL…
Community-based Health Planning and Services (Ghana) Using embedded research to test various healthcare delivery models.
Based on the findings, increasing access to care by training
community-based nurses to deliver primary health care, in close
collaboration with community health volunteers, within communities
Green villages (Rwanda) Providing housing linked to circular ecosystem services so that
community assets (cows) produce food and which is linked to waste
creation (cow’s wastes) which is linked to clean energy production
(biogas). Making ecosystem linkages including pollution, food
security, access to power and water-borne diseases
Engineering and diffusing disinfection technologies to
reduce COVID-19 risk among the homeless (Hong Kong)
Mapping community assets, using them to rank possible technology
solutions, developing technologies with features suited to the income
and cultural norms of the population, and diffusing these through an
existing network of community stakeholders and grassroots
organizations
Building a community driven pandemic detection
application (Thailand)
Learning from past outbreaks by creating a system where
representatives would report any possible zoonotic events in animals
or humans, which would be validated by analysts at a local university,
sent to livestock and public health officials who would then
implement measures for containment

13. Cross-cutting themes:
A future orientation
• Practices like future design that enable
decision-makers and communities to envision
mental health outcomes for citizens of the
future
• How should MHPSS look 50 years from now?
200 years?
• What investment and divestment decisions
will need to be made? What opportunities
can be created? How do we start to prepare?
• This will help us to address today’s problems
while also planting seeds for tomorrow’s
solutions

14. Cross-cutting themes: from static
to embedded and continuous
sensemaking
• Embedding data collection within the context of
the various systems that interface with mental
health outcomes e.g. communities, education,
healthcare
• Capturing formal as well as informal activities
that impact on mental health
• Understanding the preferences and experiences
of people as they navigate services and resources
• Identify positive deviants/bright spots to
understand community driven innovations
already happening

15. Cross-cutting themes: supply-
side innovations
• Innovations that can improve the fit between existing
interventions and their target population
• Products that improve access to mental health and
psychosocial support. Often take the form of design
modifications that may address language, spatial and
cultural limitations and stigma e.g. self-assessments.
• Processes that improve access to mental health and
psychosocial support. Uses new models to improve
dimensions of access such as cost, effectiveness,
availability

16. Cross-cutting themes: demand-
side innovation
• Levers that shape investments, regulations,
norms and stimulate innovation around
specified goals
• This can take the form of policies, funding,
advocacy and laws
• Can expand the space within which
innovation is happening
• Reduce the risk needed to make longer
term investments e.g. social impact bonds
that pay for investments in mental health
outcomes

17. Types of actors and the role
they can play in the innovation
ecosystem

18. Example: Government
Opportunities
- Can use legal and policy tools to expand the space to innovate
& time horizon of innovation
- Can be a site for institutional memory e.g. learnings from
Ebola that were transferred to dealing with COVID-19 in
South Sudan
- Can be a critical partner in extending access to MHPSS
innovations to excluded groups
Potential challenges
- Policy infrastructure is not equally strong everywhere
- Change can be reversed with changing governments,
diminishing trust
- A solely top-down lens misses the richness of opportunities to
create value that fall beneath the radar e.g. informal food
service provision, informal waste management

19. Example: Private
sector
Opportunities
- Strong skills in aligning products and their design to the needs
and preferences of users
- Business model innovations can address the needs of
underserved populations within the existing market
- Site of memory around design, technology and user needs
- Can be a source of risk capital where there is an established
market but no funding e.g. private sector funded COVID-19
screening sites in Ghana and Nigeria
Challenges
- There can be a misalignment between the profit incentive and
the impact orientation e.g. chronic diseases are profitable to
treat but we need to prevent them
- Long-term private sector innovation can by constrained market
shaping forces e.g. how do we get investments in walkable and
green transit infrastructure and not just more cars?

20. Example:
International
organizations
Opportunities
- Interfacing with governments
- Building social and political momentum
- Technical know-how
- Addressing needs and investing in solutions that may not be
profitable but are valuable
- Can provide platform for cross-country and regional learning
Challenges
- At the international level geopolitics can constrains rapid
responses
- Dance between structure and bureaucracy vs risk and innovation
- There can be conflict between local and international priorities

21. Example:
Research
institutions
Opportunities
- Creating an evidence base to understand clinical and
systemic drivers of disease
- Test interventions to truly understand what could or is
working
- Can be a source of “risk-free capital” for invention
Challenges
- Potential misalignment of incentives between scientific
output and social value
- Pipeline to transform inventions into innovation is not
always well developed

22. Approaching innovation through an
ecosystem lens
• What is the preferred future state?
• What activities will be needed today?
• What proactive investments and divestment are needed for tomorrow?
• What interventions work and how do they interface with other systems?
• What kinds of supply-side innovations e.g. products and processes can be used to accelerate impact?
• What kinds of demand-side innovations e.g. laws, investments can expand the room for innovation?
• Who are the typical actors, and where they are best placed to contribute to the long-term vision?
• What knowledge can be used to make sense of the ecosystem?
• How can your activities create leverage?

23. Look forward to continuing the
conversation