Last month, policymakers, researchers, health professionals and development partners from across East, Central and Southern Africa came together in the Kingdom of Eswatini for the East, Central and Southern Africa Health Community’s Best Practices Forum—focused on creating resilient and sustainable health solutions.
ECSA-HC works across 11 member states in the ECSA region to foster greater regional collaboration for health outcomes. The Best Practices Forum acts as a key annual platform for both member states and implementing partners to come together, share innovations, and create actionable plans for collaboration. This year’s theme was “Shaping the Future of Health in the ECSA Region: Advancing Health Security, Innovation and Sustainability.” Along with 4 sub-themes:
- Regional health security & pandemic agreement implementation
- Harnessing the Demographic Dividend & Youth Engagement
- Sustainable Financing & Partnerships
- Quality of Care & Patient Safety
Self-care cuts across each of these thematic areas, and continues to grow within the ECSA region, making this forum an important stage for the Self-Care Trailblazers Group. The Innovation Marketplace acted as a gathering place and media hub for our coalition, as well as introduced attendees to self-care and the work of the SCTG. Participants could play the “Self-Care Quiz” for prizes in order to better familiarize themselves with self-care policy, and many of our key partners stopped by for interviews and photo-ops.
Through the plenary session, the SCTG highlighted its Country Monitoring Dashboard, an innovative policy dashboard currently in use by our National Self-Care Networks. The tool was developed in 2022 and piloted by the Ugandan National Self-Care Network. Yet, through the years, we have continued to iterate based on the feedback of our partners, leading to the launch of a redesigned Dashboard in 2025.
Our latest iteration of the Country Monitoring Dashboard focuses on translating data into actionable insights by implementing a traffic-light system for policy outcomes and standardizing measurement across 11 global indicators. It responds to the needs of our partners on the ground by streamlining data collection without losing sight of country-specific milestones and narratives. It is our hope that as the Country Monitoring Dashboard continues to grow, more countries, like the ECSAH-HC member states, can implement it into their evaluation systems. The Country Monitoring Dashboard allows national health systems to focus on policy outcomes, and view them in the context of a larger regional and global movement for self-care.
We want to thank the ECSA Health Community for their continued partnership and this space to share our work. We know that effective health policy does not happen in a vacuum and requires these spaces of collaboration and shared learning to truly grow.