Work Areas
Empatika applies a cross-sectoral lens to our projects which aims to situate insights and activities within their particular contexts. This approach helps us gain a more holistic understanding of any issue or topic, including the micro, meso, and macro-level factors and the relationships between individuals, communities, and systems, while also digging deep through the use of participatory methods and tools.
Part of taking a cross-sectoral or intersectional approach includes a commitment to promoting equity and inclusivity, such as the inclusion of marginalized and vulnerable groups, as well as a consideration of gender impacts both during project design and analysis/evaluation.
We have used this approach to provide unique perspectives related to a wide range of topics such as:
among many others! Contact us to learn more about our experience and expertise.
Nutrition
Participatory and people-centered approaches are particularly effective for helping understand people’s behaviors, and nutrition is one area where actual behavior often varies significantly from reported behavior.
One of Empatika’s first projects was working with Alive & Thrive to conduct formative research on early child and maternal nutrition in Indonesia. Following the initial phase of research, the project included people-driven design workshops in communities to co-design potential solutions to key, contextually-relevant challenges in the different project locations.
This project was followed up by another multi-phase project related to child nutrition, this one working with Save the Children to help them develop a stunting alleviation program (the BISA program) in West Java and East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. Following our formative research exploring maternal, adolescent, and young child nutrition and WASH, our team conducted people-driven design workshops in the study locations as part of exploring potential solutions and to feed into the development of the program’s Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) strategy.
The solutions developed during all four co-design workshops emphasized interactive, visual, locally-resonant and personable methods. These included a lullaby developed in one community in West Java using their local language with lyrics which emphasized the importance of breastfeeding. In a community in East Nusa Tenggara, adolescents designed a card game and snakes and ladders games developed to help both adolescents and mothers learn more about nutrition.
Overarching Themes
Recurring themes among Empatika’s nutrition-related work includes:
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A significant disconnect between formal health advice, often delivered through top-down programs, and deeply ingrained community practices, traditions, and economic realities.
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People generally perceive themselves as healthy, often blaming external factors for illnesses rather than their own behaviors.
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While local health providers are trusted, people are also heavily influenced by information on social media, television and advertising, particularly regarding modern lifestyles and packaged foods.
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Challenges persist in areas like exclusive breastfeeding, complementary feeding, sanitation, and addressing specific nutritional deficiencies (e.g., iron).
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There is a critical need for people-centered, context-specific interventions that build on existing motivations, address practical constraints, and leverage trusted informal channels.
These insights and solutions led to the development of program SBC materials such as weekly iron and folic acid supplementation materials that were provided to schools and Puskesmas as well as a ‘Emo-Demo’ module that was implemented through in-person sessions in 46 program villages that was designed around “simple, yet important messages through an interactive method, games, demonstrations, and experiments, those touching caregivers’ emotions.”
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Additional Empatika experience related to nutrition includes a study assessing the key nutrition issues facing out of school adolescents in East Java and South Sulawesi, Indonesia. This included exploring the most suitable platforms or channels to engage adolescents for social behavior change programs.
Some of the key findings included how out-of-school girls and boys face very different nutrition-related challenges, and that adolescents felt they would be much more likely to use an engagement platform if they were involved in its development.
Experience outside of Indonesia includes a project in Malawi training Save the Children program and local government staff to conduct participatory research that aimed to understand the behaviors which are driving poor maternal and child nutrition outcomes, along with key barriers and potential entry points for shifting them. The second phase of this project also fed into development of the Save the Children program’s SBC strategy.
Healthcare
Beyond nutrition, much of Empatika’s recent work related to healthcare includes projects for malaria and vaccines. Our work related to malaria includes development of a Malaria Communication Guideline: Inspiring Behavior Change for UNICEF and the Indonesian Ministry of Health. This SBCC guideline was the result of three years of work, starting with a multi-phase formative study on malaria in high endemic areas in Indonesia and culminating with guidelines co-developed with communities in Eastern Indonesia. The guideline was developed for use by local communities and frontline health workers – designed to be relevant, contextualized to different community situations, and easy to use with familiar, everyday language.
Our most recent work focused on vaccines was a study to learn about the experiences of girls and caregivers related to HPV vaccination in Indonesia. While roll out of Indonesia’s HPV vaccination program for girls in school has been successful thus far, JSI, in collaboration with the Indonesian Ministry of Health and CHAI, engaged Empatika to help identify ways to also reach out-of-school girls. We also wanted to look closer at the experiences of in-school girls to see what lessons can be learned and what can still be improved.
The findings from the study highlighted how there is still much to learn behind the numbers. In this case, while vaccine uptake for in-school girls is very good, our team found that there are still many things that could be improved with the vaccination process.
Our other vaccine-related projects included a study exploring the policies of labor-intensive industries towards child immunization to help guide the government of Indonesia in updating relevant policies and strategic planning. This study followed two projects related to COVID-19 – an innovative remote study on people and families’ experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic and their associated coping strategies. Data was gathered using a combination of phone calls, messaging, photo and video sharing with families and community members that Empatika researchers had met during previous immersion research. Empatika also conducted in-person, action-oriented research in areas of Indonesia with lower COVID-19 vaccination rates and less adherence to COVID-19 health protocols.
Overarching Themes
Recurring themes among Empatika’s healthcare-related work includes:
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Critical Gaps Between Public Health Goals and Community Practices
There is often a significant disconnect between recommended health behaviors and actual community practices. This gap is sustained by challenges such as how communities tend to perceive risk (i.e. people tend to perceive risk based on tangible and observable threats), a relatively weak adherence to health protocols, a lack of knowledge about many health issues and diseases, and significant practical or social barriers to accessing care.
2. The Power of Social and Cultural Determinants
Health decisions and behaviors are profoundly shaped by deeply ingrained gender and social norms, the influence of local leaders, economic realities, and community-level social dynamics. For example, the need to earn a living often outweighs perceived health risks; while social norms around sex limit information seeking behavior by adolescents and their understanding of issues related to sexual consent.
3. Information Sharing and Institutional Performance
A recurring theme is the failure of centralized communication campaigns. Communities rely on informal, interpersonal networks for information, and their experiences with public services sometimes reinforce perceptions that these can be intimidating and less personal.
Education
Empatika’s projects related to education span mixed methods studies in Indonesia related to girls’ participation and informal learning centers, an education program for refugees and marginalized children in Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Other qualitative projects in Indonesia include recent work related to literacy, and the COVID-19 study.
Overarching Themes
Some overarching themes with our education-related work in Indonesia includes:
1. Low Parental Engagement
Parents are very supportive of their children gaining an education, but their actual involvement in their children’s learning is often limited. While some of this is due to busy work schedules, there are also widespread beliefs that hinder greater parents' involvement such as a belief that ‘learning happens in school’ and is teachers’ responsibilities, as well as a belief among many parents, particularly those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, that they are not qualified or capable of helping their children with schoolwork/learning.
2. Widespread Literacy Challenges
Literacy challenges among many Indonesian children are influenced by learning methods that continue to focus primarily on memorization, a lack of reading materials at schools that students find interesting, and low parental involvement.
3. Limited Teacher Capacity
Particularly in more rural and remote areas, many teachers lack the skills, resources, and sometimes the motivation to implement more engaging and effective teaching methods, such as those related to literacy. Current training programs for teachers often lack more practical lessons, or are oriented more towards teachers in cities/those with better resources.
4. Boys Falling Behind?
While girls face some gender-specific challenges, particularly as they near adolescence, overall it is boys that are performing less well in school and appear to face more learning-specific challenges.
5. Barriers to Inclusive Education for Children with Disabilities (CwD)
Finding early childhood education facilities that accept and adequately support CwD is a major challenge for parents. Learn more about our work with CwD below.
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GEDSI
Empatika’s holistic and participatory approach to projects provides an integrated base for exploring and understanding GEDSI-related issues and topics.
Overarching Themes
Some of the overarching themes we have found in our projects on GEDSI-related topics include:
1. Information and Knowledge Gaps
Adolescent girls, the urban poor, parents of children with disabilities, and communities navigating public health initiatives, as just some examples, all face obstacles rooted in significant information gaps, which also influences a general lack of knowledge about issues such as disabilities, diseases, vaccines, and available support systems.
2. The Pervasive Impact of Social and Gender Norms
Deeply entrenched social and gender norms dictate girls' education and career paths, create taboos impacting sexual and reproductive health, foster stigma against the urban poor and parents with children with disabilities, and place unequal expectations and burdens of care on girls and women.
3. Stigma and Social Exclusion
Street workers and parents with disabilities both face strong stigma from people in their own communities and society at large. For street workers, this often leads them to hide their work and self-isolate. For some parents of CwD, this stigma and judgment can lead to depression and feeling like they are inadequate parents.
4. Fragmented Support Systems
Formal systems designed to support vulnerable populations are frequently characterized by a lack of coordination, insufficient resources, and a failure to address the specific, nuanced needs of their target users. This forces individuals to rely on informal networks and private services.
5. Administrative Requirements
Many vulnerable populations also face issues accessing support due to requirements such needing local ID and family cards.
6. The Critical Role of Agency, Confidence, and Empowerment
A recurring consequence of the barriers faced by vulnerable population is a lack of agency and confidence. This affects areas such as young women and street workers’ ambitions, parents’ confidence in supporting their children, and girls’ confidence in demanding consent in their romantic relationships
Recent Projects
Recent GEDSI-related projects include exploring HPV vaccination for girls, assessing a girls empowerment program, gender barriers related to youth entrepreneurship, supporting transformative parental engagement for children with disabilities, exploring pathways to empowering urban poor communities, and facilitating a storytelling project with youth in the Philippines and Morocco related to self-care, sex and sexuality and reproductive health.
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Climate & Post-Disaster
Empatika is currently working on an Inclusive Needs and Equity Assessment for the Jakarta Integrated Low Emissions Zone (Kawasan Rendah Emisi Terpadu), in collaboration with Jakarta Government, Breathe Cities and a variety of other partners and stakeholders. This work is part of a series of feasibility studies and implementation roadmaps for this planned Low Emissions Zone.
Our role is particularly focused on understanding i) air pollution impacts on vulnerable groups as well as the day-to-day commute, livelihoods, and social activities of people in the proposed low emissions zone in order to describe potential impacts of the low emissions zone. This will include challenges and benefits on mobility and livelihoods, including potential risks, costs, or unintended consequences, as well as socio-economic opportunities and what type of engagement and involvement local communities want.
Our team has worked on a variety of post-disaster related projects, starting with our innovative study on ‘Listening to Children who were affected by the Central Sulawesi earthquake and tsunami. Other work includes exploring a mixed methods study on people’s perspectives of multi-purpose cash assistance in East Lombok, which included looking at longer-term impacts related to the Lombok earthquake as well as early impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
