The project involves five phases:
Phase I – Initial framework development and formative research phase (in progress): This phase will be for the first 10 months of the project period. It will focus on understanding the decision-making processes around family planning in fragile situation and to develop a participatory design process for rights-based digital health strategies.
Phase II – Co-design and development of interventions phase (Planned): Workshops will be conducted in each country with local stakeholders (researchers, Community Advisory Committee members, and partnering organizations) to co-design and develop a starting set of digital health solutions to promote FP among clients, based on the evidence collected in phase 1 and in consideration of the local contexts.
Phase III – Capacity building of healthcare providers (Planned): This phase will be geared to enhance the participating healthcare providers to provide adequate couples’ counseling based on the best available evidence and where the process is culturally sensitive, gender-appropriate, and equitable. The training package will include effective FP counseling. Blended learning format (a combination of face-to-face and online) will be used to train health professionals and community workers, in combination with the self-paced, on demand mobile app resource (Oppia Mobile.)
Phase IV- Implementation and evaluation of the Intervention for clients (Planned): This phase is research focused; adopting a stratified parallel-group pilot cluster randomized clinical trial (RCT) design to compare the intervention package targeting clients alone. We will compare an intervention including enhanced counselling plus digital health support for clients, with an intervention including enhanced counselling alone.
Phase V- Dissemination (Planned): Several reports, publications, and presentations will be prepared to share the findings with policy makers, media, the general public, and academic beneficiaries in both countries. Some preliminary findings might be shared after the first phase once the formative research phase is concluded. Initial manuscripts will include a case study reporting the rationale of the study and a study protocol for the intervention, which will be submitted to the international trial registry (ISRCTN). a case study/process paper on the implementation of the protocol, including lessons from the development phase (co-design research process will be produced).