Institutional North-South partnerships play an important role in developing essential services in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). Due to travel restrictions and reduced availability for collaboration COVID-19 has disrupted North-South institutional partnership programmes addressing essential health services.

This includes:

• Disruption to capacity building workshops
• Reduced networking opportunities and sharing of learning between healthcare organisations and workers in different countries
• Reduced opportunities for collaboration with other health organisations

With disruption to travel caused by COVID-19, partners used innovative approaches with digital platforms to share learning on maintaining essential services.

The ESTHER Alliance and Irish Global Health Network launched a webinar series ‘Conversations on COVID-19’ via Zoom with a specific focus on LMICs. The webinar series was aimed at healthcare and development workers, serving to educate, inform, share best practice and evidence-based responses around COVID-19 in LMICs. Most topics directly or indirectly addressed the challenges of maintaining health services in the context of the pandemic.

Twenty regular webinars have been held with more than 104 speakers from different backgrounds and a range of countries. Online views to the series have amounted to more than 14,500. Reports on participant demographic revealed audience came from 71 countries worldwide.

Topics relating to essential services included: Funding Challenges; Hospital Readiness; North-South Partnerships during COVID-19; Lessons learned from HIV & Ebola epidemics; Leveraging Research and Evidence; Protecting Health Care Workers; Health Systems Impacts of COVID-19; Essential Services for NCD Patients in Ethiopia; Malnutrition.

The series was by nature very participatory with a regular anchor and an average of five speakers who spoke to their area of expertise, sharing best practices, experiences and learning. Monitoring and Evaluation submission forms were used to collate participant feedback on perceived content gaps in order to plan topics for future webinars.

Other outcomes included:

• Supported countries in maintaining essential health services.
• Responded to travel restrictions with alternative way for partners to meet and share learnings.
• Webinars were effective in capturing and sharing learning at sub national level.
• Demonstrated value of North-South partnership model at a time of significant disruption.

• Sourcing speakers was challenging due to competing demands:
Speakers were identified through personal connections and networks.
• Covering multiple themes in response to audience demand:
To respond to this need, we recruited speakers from a range of backgrounds to respond to questions from healthcare workers.
• Sharing information in a timely manner in a rapidly evolving environment:
We promoted webinars widely via bi-weekly newsletters and an integrated social media campaign. Webinars were supplemented with an online repository of curated COVID-19 information.
• Disseminating the information in a digestible format to maximise engagement on recorded views online:
Developed dedicated web pages with speaker summaries, video contributions by speaker, resources shared in downloadable format, and online links posted.