The following are some of the key insights from the study across the three primary topics:

Livelihoods and Social Assistance

• Most families experienced a decline in income. Many migrants that returned home remained unemployed; informal labourers were significantly affected due to issues such as less infrastructure and renovation projects in villages; kiosk owners near schools suffered reduced sales because schools were closed; and farmers faced lower crop prices particularly from May to August 2020. Only farmers who own land, civil servants and salaried employees that felt least affected financially by the pandemic. (click read more to see the rest of this post)
  

Empatika kicked off 2021 with a study about malaria programs in Eastern Indonesia, focusing on the social factors that influence how people access malaria prevention and treatment services. Even though malaria programs have been delivered nationwide since 1959, with a more recent target to achieve malaria-free status by 2030, malaria cases remain high especially in the eastern part of Indonesia. This study aims to provide deeper insights and a better understanding of community experience in order to strengthen existing malaria interventions, particularly communication strategies that can encourage positive behaviour in using malaria prevention-related services.

For this study, the Empatika team visited four districts including Southwest Sumba, NTT; Mimika and Jayapura, Papua; and Manokwari, West Papua. Within each district, our team spent time in two different communities.

The study was carried out in two stages including adapted immersions along with follow-up People Driven Design (PDD) workshops. The first stage using adapted immersions was done in mid-January—the method was adjusted from Empatika’s typical immersion approach to mitigate COVID-19 risks to both participants and researchers. For these adapted immersions, researchers visited communities from morning until evening over a period of days but spent nights at a guesthouse close to the community rather than staying with families. During this stage, we focused on understanding the local context and people’s behaviour in relation to malaria prevention and treatment.

The second stage included People Driven Design (PDD) workshops in communities that took place in early March. PDD is an approach based on the principles of human-centred design with an emphasis on directly engaging people in identifying their own behaviour challenges, setting goals, and developing their own ideas to encourage positive behaviour change. For these workshops we focused on one community each across the four districts. Building on the rapport built throughout the adapted immersions, Empatika researchers held interactive discussions with a group of community members and health providers over a period of five days. We discussed insights from the adapted immersions  including people’s thoughts about their priorities, facilitated them to brainstorm, develop and try out local solutions that could encourage positive behaviour change related to accessing malaria treatment and prevention.

Through the PDD process, we were very encouraged by community members and health providers’ enthusiasm to promote positive behaviours in their communities. Currently, the behaviour change solutions that they co-designed continue to be trialed, promoted and refined by the community members and health providers. We hope this study as well as the groups’ local solutions can give valuable feedback to improving malaria programs in the future.

We hope to be able to share some of the study's outputs in the next few months.

One of the key topics highlighted in our Longitudinal Remote Insights Gathering study on Children and Their Families’ Experiences during the COVID-19 Pandemic was the challenges for children’s learning and education. This included the many struggles faced by students, teachers, and parents in shifting to different types of ‘distance learning’ and the education system’s overall lack of preparedness for implementing distance or digital learning on a larger or long-term scale.

Empatika was excited to be able to explore some of the gaps of the digital learning situation in more detail in a new study working once again as the local partner in Indonesia with Quicksand Design Studio (our second recent collaboration). This situational analysis study aims to provide insights on the digital learning landscape in Indonesia, using an equity lens to highlight key disparities that exist among different regions and socio-economic backgrounds. We combined secondary research, expert interviews with people from the Ministry of Education and Culture and EduTech Companies (such as Zenius and Sekolahmu), as well as virtual interviews with teachers, students, and parents from Papua, East Java, West Sulawesi, Central Sulawesi, East Nusa Tenggara, Maluku, and West Java. The report provides an overview of the access to and quality of digital learning along with insights on internet connectivity and affordability; the availability of digital learning devices; the relevance and content of digital platforms; and the digital skills of students and teachers.    

Some of the insights from the study include:

• The pandemic has resulted in an upsurge of platform and content innovations within the education space, by both the government and the private sector. However, little awareness and perceptions of low quality content have limited its uptake.
• Private EdTech platforms are mostly focused on private schools and final-year school students. While some government programmes have come up to address private sector gaps, the needs of vulnerable communities are not yet adequately met, especially in the case of special needs students.
• The shift of education outside the physical space in classrooms has led to challenges for monitoring teaching and learning performance.
• Despite numerous initiatives to improve the poor internet connectivity across the archipelago, progress is slow and a large proportion of the population still does not have adequate internet connectivity to learn online.
• Limited access to affordable quality internet and poor availability of appropriate digital devices makes learning from home less conducive for most students - especially those in remote and poor settings like 3T areas.
• The Government's efforts to provide internet packages have faced limitations in design and implementation, limiting its Uptake.
• Students have strong potential for digital learning, as many of them are 'digital natives'. Despite this, they lack adequate 'digital skills' that would prepare them for the 'digital economy'.
• Many students struggle to adjust to this new way of learning, and their parents lack the capacity to adequately support them.
• Inadequate support for teachers to transition to digital learning has posed challenges for them to adapt. This is accentuated by their poor formative training and limited pre-existing digital skills.
• Government interventions focused on teachers, have thus far been top-down in their approach and largely failed to include teachers in their design and formulation.
  

Check out the full report here.