Description
Introduction
Climate change has been identified by many international parties as the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. However, among those most negatively impacted by the effects of climate change are the youths, who are concentrated in many of Nigeria's most vulnerable communities. Yet, youths are often excluded from meaningful engagement in the development, implementation, or evaluation of climate health programs. Therefore, there is an urgent need for youths to be equipped with the data, institutional support, and resources they need to advocate for their own futures, especially at the local level. This study describes the process of co-creating local advocacy infographics with Nigerian youths on climate health through a theory-based participatory approach.
Method
In phase 1, we launched a crowdsourcing open call among Nigerian youths, soliciting lived experiences and unique challenges faced by the effects of climate change, air pollution, and heat. This phase employed methods recommended by the UNDP/World Bank/WHO Special Program for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR) practical guide on crowdsourcing. This initial phase was also supplemented by an evidence review of the published literature to draft themes.
In phase 2, we invited 10 young adults aged 18–30 years to a virtual participatory workshop to co-create and translate climate health advocacy infographics into 10 local languages based on the drafted themes from the first phase. Another phase of a modified Delphi survey and an open peer review process among climate health stakeholders were conducted to finalize the content of the infographics. Finally, the 10 youths from phase 2 were invited to lead dissemination campaigns of the co-developed infographics online and in person across different communities.
Results and Discussions
A total of 27 youths and 4 stakeholders across 11 different states in Nigeria participated in all phases of the project.
The co-created infographic defines climate change in simple terms, its impact on health and gives a call to action on what individuals and the public should do in their respective homes and communities to mitigate its effects. After the dissemination of the infographics online across social media platforms, the total number of engagements on the infographics across social media platforms within 14 days was 12,000, including on Twitter (72.6%), WhatsApp (19.4%), and Instagram (8%). Engagement was measured as the number of likes, retweets, views, comments, and shares across the platforms. During the in-person activities, we were able to reach over 1000 people across the various communities. This was measured by the total number of infographics disseminated within a 3-day campaign.
Conclusions
Our project acknowledges the agency of youths and the importance of their voice on climate change matters. We have demonstrated that participatory approaches like crowdsourcing and youth engagement can be used to develop advocacy materials on climate change and health. Our findings are consistent with other crowdsourcing open calls that have been used to identify and develop educational resources in medicine and public health.
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