Identifying potential uses of crowdsourcing in global health, conflict, and humanitarian settings: an adapted CHNRI (Child Health and Nutrition Initiative) exercise

BACKGROUND: Crowdsourcing, outsourcing problems and tasks to a crowd, has grown exponentially since the term was coined a decade ago. Being a rapid and inexpensive approach, it is particularly amenable to addressing problems in global health, conflict and humanitarian settings, but its potential has not been systematically assessed. We employed the Child Health and Nutrition Research Initiative’s (CHNRI) method to generate a ranked list of potential uses of crowdsourcing in global health and conflict. PROCESS: 94 experts in global health and crowdsourcing submitted their ideas, and 239 ideas were scored. Each expert scored ideas against three of seven criteria, which were tailored specifically for the exercise. A relative ranking was calculated, along with an Average Expert Agreement (AEA). FINDINGS: On a scale from 0-100, the scores assigned to proposed ideas ranged from 80.39 to 42.01. Most ideas were related to problem solving (n = 112) or data generation (n = 91). Using health care workers to share information about disease outbreaks to ensure global response had the highest score and agreement. Within the top 15, four additional ideas related to containing communicable diseases, two ideas related to using crowdsourcing for vital registration and two to improve maternal and child health. The top conflict ideas related to epidemic responses and various aspects of disease spread. Wisdom of the crowds and machine learning scored low despite being promising in literature. INTERPRETATIONS: Experts were invited to generate ideas during the Ebola crisis and to score during reports of Zika, which may have affected the scoring. However, crowdsourcing’s rapid, inexpensive characteristics make it suitable for addressing epidemics. Given that many ideas reflected Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), crowdsourcing may be an innovative solution to achieving some of the SDGs.