Jessica Kritz, J.D., M.A.
Assistant Professor
Department of global Health
school of health
Georgetown UniversitY
Grand challenges require grand strategies. Prof. Kritz’s interdisciplinary research—at the intersection of public administration and health, law and policy—unites vulnerable communities with the systems they need, to create change.
Open defecation at the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by plastic bottles. Photo credit: Case Communications
about
Jessica Kritz is a participatory action researcher focused on cross-sector collaboration around complex health challenges. Her current research collaborations include:
participatory action research with informal sector workers and communities (e-waste and scrap workers, fisherfolk) to resolve wicked problems at the intersection of climate, the environment and health
GOGREEN, a global study on co-creating the green transition
enshrining and implementing rights through public administration law and policy, and
intervention design modeling the COVID-19 response of a rural, Appalachian county in North Carolina.
Since 2015, the anchor for this work is Jessica's empirical research on intervention design to resolve wicked problems in Ghana. This project was designed to provide direct services to the most vulnerable beneficiaries, while also advancing theory and generating rigorous academic research outcomes. Jessica began the research with one Catholic sister, the municipal health department and community leaders in Old Fadama, the largest urban slum in Accra. At the time, Old Fadama was a government "no-go zone" because it was in active conflict with the government; the research team and municipal public health officers entered the community with armed guards. Jessica trained stakeholders and a local facilitator from the National Catholic Health Service on the best evidence on cross-sector collaboration. They used that evidence to develop a culturally appropriate collaboration process to address recurring cholera epidemics resulting from outbreaks in the community: complex environmental and health challenges. The collaboration process was modeled as an intervention, drawing on data from 300 core stakeholders and hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries in Old Fadama. Now in its eighth year, the project has served more than 10,000 of Ghana's most vulnerable with direct services that they requested, in other slums in Accra and Kumasi and more than fifteen sites in rural communities in northern Ghana, using local resources. The collaboration intervention worked where other, more traditional development projects did not, and is currently being scaled up with support of the Ghana national government. This low-cost, locally-designed tool dramatically improved participation, changed government policy, and resulted in numerous projects providing new services to Ghana's most vulnerable.
Jessica has conducted prior research in Rwanda, Palestine, and South Africa.
Jessica and her husband Brian have served on the boards of multiple community organizations in their Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC. Their son Theodore (12) attends Rochambeau: The French International School, where Jessica serves as President of the Parents Association Rochambeau.
GHANA Cross-Sector Collaboration
Cross-sector collaboration is a tool to address systemic issues in urban slums in developing countries worldwide. In Accra, Ghana hundreds of thousands of people have flooded the modern city seeking employment and liberation from increasingly difficult lives. This rapid growth has contributed to the multitude of development challenges the community faces, including high rates of environmental deterioration, poverty and unemployment, high levels of social conflict and gender-based violence, overcrowding, inadequate housing and infrastructure, and poor sanitation and waste management.
Cross-sector collaboration is being pioneered through a model in Old Fadama, the largest urban slum in Accra, Ghana with an estimated population of 150,000. In February of 2015, the city led the development of a cross-sector collaboration to address these complex challenges, researched by Professor Jessica Kritz of Georgetown University and funded by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. The collaboration is facilitated by the National Catholic Health Service (NCHS), with stakeholders including five Catholic Sisters’ organizations, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA), the Old Fadama Youth Development Association (OFADA) and the Kayayei Youth Association of Ghana.
“Thank God you are here. We need help. Everything we have tried in this community seems to fail. I am meeting with the press again this week about the cholera epidemic that originated there...We can’t find the solution to this problem on our own.”
The project uses Participatory Action Research (PAR), which involves researchers and participants working together to define the problem and formulate research questions and solutions. The participants were entirely local organizations, including stakeholders from city government, local non-governmental organizations, and the slum community. The stakeholders resourced their own participation, made the strategy decisions and selected the challenge to install latrines. The PAR process introduced the concept of cross-sector collaboration, educated the stakeholders about the existing evidence, and supported the stakeholders in forming a cross-sector collaboration.
Using an innovative stakeholder platform that supports cross-sector collaboration around Old Fadama community needs, the government was able to work with transparency and provide a voice for citizens to take part in resolving challenges that affect them. This stakeholder platform provides for one government official to interface with the leaders of 16 tribes of Old Fadama. These leaders’ perspectives are corroborated with 300 research participants—each of whom have their own networks and communities—to develop consensus-based solutions required to improve the lives of the 100,000-150,000 people who dwell in the slum.
Each phase of the research resulted in decision-making by consensus, meaning that all stakeholders were in agreement, which led to the next phase of the project. The stakeholders’ first strategy, improving community health by installing latrines, resulted in city sanitation policy change. The strategy was adopted by local businesses, creating local sustainability and freeing the stakeholders to develop a new strategy.
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