Community engagement: learning from low-income countries

[...]multiple actors involved in epidemic response have advocated involving communities, stakeholders, and civil society organisations in epidemic response efforts,2 particularly because top-down interventions cannot tackle underlying structural shortcomings that lead to distrust, rumours, and non-compliance. Learning from this failure to engage communities, public health actors, and institutions now often ensures that response efforts are accompanied by community engagement activities—most notably in low-income and middle-income countries, and far less frequently in Europe.4 However, the COVID-19 pandemic response showed that community engagement models, largely developed for health crises in low-income countries, could be equally important in high-income countries. In our on-the-ground experience, we have found it challenging to implement community engagement that accounts simultaneously for all of the relevant standards defined by WHO, UNICEF, and other stakeholders and to operationalise these standards into daily practice.