From Community Engagement to Shared Ownership of Evidence: Lessons in Co-creation from the ANeSA Initiative
- Advocacy, Policy Engagement and Communications, Sexual, Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health (SRMNCAH)
Co-creation is seen as a critical approach in adolescent sexual and reproductive health programming because it shifts projects from top-down design toward shared ownership of evidence and solutions. Research shows that engaging end users — including adolescents, caregivers, frontline workers, and policymakers — improves relevance, trust, implementation quality, and policy uptake, as stakeholders help shape research questions, tools, and interventions from the outset (Boyd et al., 2012; Hickey et al., 2018).
Co-creation strengthens buy-in, accelerates adoption of interventions, and produces locally grounded solutions because communities move from being respondents to knowledge partners. Conversely, failure to co-create often leads to resistance, mistrust, low participation, poorly adapted tools, and limited use of findings, since interventions may not reflect lived realities or priorities of knowledge users. Without co-creation, research risks extractive practices that weaken ethical integrity and policy influence. Integrating co-creation, therefore, enhances legitimacy, improves data quality, supports sustainable implementation, and ensures that evidence is actionable, owned, and more likely to drive meaningful change in adolescent SRHR programs.
