Building Healthy Cities (BHC) is a five-year (2017–2022) learning project, funded by the United States Agency for International Development, and conducted in four cities including Da Nang, Vietnam. BHC is designed to increase understanding of the best routes for improving the social determinants of health in urban contexts.
To inform this approach, several exploratory data collection activities were completed in the first year of the project in Da Nang. The inquiry included several stakeholder gatherings between September 2019 and October 2020. Two mapping workshops were held with key system actors, where participants took part in an introduction to systems analysis, followed by a series of collaborative exercises aimed at eliciting community understanding of various causal relationships at play within the system. Three community socialization groups were also conducted to test, refine, and deepen understanding with perspectives from across the system.
The result was a working map that holds the key dynamics – the patterns underneath the problems – highlighted by the combined stories of these stakeholders. It represents an initial "theory of context" that lays the groundwork for practical next steps to find places of leverage for addressing social and environmental determinants of health. This brief was written by JSI in 2021.
We strive to build lasting relationships to produce better health outcomes for all.
