Bridging Health and Hope in South Asia’: Campbell South Asia’s Story

Introduction

In South Asia, conversations about health often begin in clinics and hospitals. But very quickly, they spill into kitchens, schools and farms. A mother’s health is tied to the food she eats, the work she does and the education she received as a girl. A newborn’s survival depends as much on skilled medical care as it does on family support, safe housing and community practices. Campbell South Asia was born from this recognition: health cannot be separated from its social roots.

The Beginning of a Journey

When Campbell South Asia (CSA), a regional centre for Campbell Collaboration, started its work, the question we faced was simple yet daunting: How can we make evidence useful in contexts where health and social issues are deeply intertwined? Policymakers were asking not just about the effectiveness of vaccines or clinical programs, but also about how nutrition, climate, agriculture, education and women’s empowerment shape outcomes. Researchers were hungry for data and communities were eager for solutions that reflected their realities.

This was our starting point.

The Problem We Saw

South Asia carries some of the world’s heaviest burdens—high maternal and neonatal mortality, widespread undernutrition and persistent inequities. But the problems rarely arrived one at a time. A malnourished child was often also a child living in poverty, whose mother lacked access to healthcare, whose family depended on uncertain agricultural income and whose community held strong gender norm.

Evidence existed, but it was scattered. Health researchers published in one corner, social scientists in another. Policymakers had to navigate silos, with little clarity on how interventions worked together in real-world settings.

Searching for Better Answers

CSA set out to change this. We began weaving evidence into maps—evidence and gap maps (EGMs)—that did not stop at the clinic door but stretched across households and communities.

Our EGMs and reviews on children, violence, women’s empowerment, neonatal health, humanities, disaster management, atrocity prevention (see www.campbellsouthasia.org to read the maps and reviews), for example, pulled together interventions that ranged from neonatal care in hospital to health worker education in the community, gender and agriculture. Every study offered a thread of insight, and our role was to weave those threads into patterns that decision-makers could see and use.

Building Alliances

We also learned quickly that no single organisation could bridge health and social outcomes alone. That is why CSA works closely with Cochrane India and JBI. Together, we are strengthening the foundations of evidence-based healthcare by ensuring that health interventions and social interventions are considered side by side. Clinical trials and health programs show us what works in treatment; social science evidence shows us what shapes behaviour, access and equity. Only when these two streams flow together can we achieve sustainable impact.

What Happened Along the Way
The results have been both humbling and inspiring. Governments and funding agencies have begun using our EGMs to identify investment opportunities that not only strengthen nutrition programs but also advance gender equity. Indian institutions, such as ICMR, AIIMS Rishikesh, Cochrane India, the International Rice Research Institute, CDC India and MANT Kolkata, have partnered with us to co-create training programs and knowledge products reflecting the South Asian context. International organisations, including WHO and UNICEF, have drawn on our syntheses to bridge the gap between health and social policy. Most importantly, the conversations themselves have evolved. Policymakers are no longer asking ’What works in health?’ but rather ’What works for people’s lives?’—a shift that reflects a more holistic understanding of well-being.

Challenges Along the Road
Of course, it hasn’t been easy. Too often, the data we needed did not exist, or it was buried in studies that overlooked social dimension. Translating global evidence into local contexts meant wrestling with complexity—and sometimes with resistance. Yet, we learned that partnerships and persistence matter. By bringing policymakers, researchers and communities together, we could make evidence not only accessible but meaningful. For example, when we first began integrating social determinants such as gender equity and livelihoods into discussions on maternal, neonatal health and pandemic response, several partners questioned whether these issues were relevant to ‘clinical’ outcomes. Convincing them required not only presenting data but also creating spaces for dialogue through joint workshops and training sessions where public health experts and social scientists could see how interconnected their work truly was. Over time, those conversations helped shift perspectives. We learned that partnerships and persistence matter; by bringing policymakers, researchers and communities together, we could make evidence not only accessible but meaningful.

The Road Ahead
Our journey is far from over. CSA is now expanding its focus to adolescent health, nutrition transitions and gender-transformative interventions. We are building digital portals so that evidence is not locked in journals but at the fingertips of decision-makers. And we are forging South-South collaborations to ensure that LMIC-generated evidence shapes global debates.

Key Take-Home Message
The story of CSA Asia is a story about widening the frame of what we mean by ‘evidence.’ Health, we’ve learned, is not confined to hospital walls or policy briefs; it lives in homes, in classrooms, in fields and in the quiet decisions families make every day. It is about dignity as much as diagnosis, about equity as much as efficiency.

Working alongside partners such as Cochrane India, JBI and many others, we have discovered that when evidence from health and social sciences meets, it doesn’t just inform programs, it transforms lives. It helps policymakers see patterns they had missed and communities recognise the power of their own lived knowledge. This is how we move from evidence for healthcare to evidence for well-being.

If there’s one insight we would pass on, it is this: real change begins when evidence meets empathy. In this context, empathy is not just compassion, but understanding people’s realities behind the data—listening to people’s experiences, contexts and voices so that evidence reflects not just what works, but for whom and why).

Data can show us what works, but it is dialogue which is open, respectful and inclusive that shows us why it works and for whom. Our journey has taught us that progress rarely comes from grand leaps; it comes from many small bridges between sectors, between people, between ways of knowing.

So, to anyone striving to make research matter: start by listening. Listen to the communities you hope to serve, to the data that challenges your assumptions and to the partners who see the world differently. Because when we weave all those voices together, evidence becomes more than knowledge, it becomes HOPE.

The story of CSA is a story about broadening the lens of evidence-based healthcare. Health is not just about treating disease; it is about ensuring dignity, equity and opportunity. By working with partners such as Cochrane India, JBI and relevant stakeholders, we are showing that health and social issues must go hand in hand. This is how we move from evidence for healthcare to evidence for well-being.

References

Campbell Collaboration (2025). Evidence and Gap Map on Interventions to Reduce Neonatal Mortality in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (forthcoming).

Campbell South Asia (2024). Evidence Portal on Food Systems, Diet Diversity and Climate Change. New Delhi: CSA.

Jordan, Z., Pilla, B., Porritt, K., Munn, Z., Aromataris, E., & Lockwood, C. (2023). Turning the flywheel: mobilizing the JBI model of evidence-based healthcare. JBI Evidence Implementation, 21(1), 96–100. https://doi.org/10.1097/XEB.0000000000000342

Saran, A., White, H., & Kuper, H. (2020). Evidence and gap map of studies assessing the effectiveness of interventions for people with disabilities in low- and middle-income countries. Campbell Systematic Reviews, 16(1), e1070. https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1070

This is a repost of World EBHC Day Blog.

The link to the original article – DOI: https://doi.org/10.70253/XLJK4981