Rana Saleh
Knowledge to Policy Center, AUB, Lebanon
Title: Promoting Effective School Policies for Childhood Obesity Prevention in Lebanon through Advocacy, Citizen Engagement and Knowledge Translation
Biography
Biography: Rana Saleh
Abstract
Background: Child overweight & obesity (COO) in Lebanon has reached alarming levels of 34.8% & 13.2% respectively. With one of the highest percentages in the Eastern Mediterranean region, COO in Lebanon increased by approximately two folds in the past decade, without policies for prevention, despite mounting evidence of their effectiveness. This study examines the use of citizen engagement, advocacy & knowledge translation (KT) tools & platform in the uptake of research evidence on effective school policies in COB prevention.
Methods: The following work was conducted & evaluated: 1) development of a policy brief for effective school policies for COO prevention in Lebanon, 2) Citizen Consultation (CC) meetings using innovative data visualization (IDV), 3) a national Policy Dialogue (PD),
4) implementation of an advocacy framework. Results: The policy brief: Synthesizing high quality international & local evidence along with key informant interviews resulted in identifying 3 major effective elements for a comprehensive school policy solution. The CC & PD: Those elements were discussed in both dialogues for consensus & identifying key implementation considerations using IDVs. Furthermore, the participants in the CC thought that it can affect decision makers (70%), allow joint decision making (70%) and almost all wanted to be involved in further advocacy efforts. The advocacy framework: a framework was developed & piloted over the course of the implementation of the policy elements. Conclusion: School policies for COO prevention are effective but require using an integrated KT approach to bring a change in policy & practice. That entails engaging citizens in the decision-making & implementing evidence-informed advocacy strategies & coalitions to influence actions along with using KT tools and platforms. Citizen engagement strategies empower citizens to be involved in the decision- making process & in enhancing accountability & advocacy in health policy. Study findings will inform similar work in other countries.