Co-Creating Community Health Solutions in Rural Sindh, Pakistan

Project start date: 01/01/2025

Project end date: 28/02/2025

Situation

In peri-urban Thatta, Sindh, maternal and newborn health services are undermined by limited transportation, inadequate facilities, and cultural barriers. Women often face delivery complications due to distant health centers, financial hurdles, and lack of skilled care at home. Community distrust, shaped by negative past experiences, further deters institutional healthcare use.

Assignment

Proportion was brought in to lead an ideation process grounded in human-centered design. The goal: translate formative research into actionable, community-generated health concepts. These were to address access, quality, and cultural acceptability—especially around emergency care, skilled delivery, and shared decision-making in maternal health.

Approach

A two-day workshop engaged women, husbands, and mothers-in-law in co-creation. Participants identified key pain points, reframed them into design challenges, and ideated solutions. Facilitators guided groups to prioritize ideas grounded in lived experience, later consolidated into four scalable concepts: Community Health Coaches, Social Support Activists, Maternity Houses, and Respectful Quality Care.

Results

Community-designed prototypes emerged—targeting transport pooling, awareness campaigns, local maternity hubs, and peer-driven counselling. These solutions laid the groundwork for sustainable, trust-based healthcare improvements embedded in local realities.

This project was commissioned by Proportion Global for client, Royal Institute for the Tropics (KIT) and performed by Thomas and Ayesha, members of the Proportion Global community. If you’ve enjoyed reading this case and want to dive deeper, we’d love to hear from you and we will connect you with relevant designers like the team, who worked on this project Contact Us