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Learning to Listen: A Quest to Strengthen Evidence in Community-Led Innovations in Thailand

By Hat (Angkana T Huang), CSIDNet Fellow

I came into this fellowship with an idealized vision. Somewhere out there, I imagined, were grassroots movements and unsung community innovators waiting to be found, mapped, and amplified. This would solve the frustration I had been carrying for years as an infectious disease modeler working on dengue in Thailand: despite decades of scientific progress, practices on the ground remained stubbornly unchanged. Perhaps the science we diligently produce is too impractical to act on. Perhaps the evidence never reaches the people who need it most. This fellowship felt like a chance to stop asking that question in the abstract and start putting out answers to the real world. My plan was simple: compile a database of CSID-related work from local innovation competitions, then grow the pool through snowball interviews. Clean, purposeful, manageable.

Reality, as it tends to do, had other plans.

1. Rethinking “Community”

The first blow to the idealized vision: most of the action I found wasn’t coming from civil society or villagers organizing themselves. It was coming from the government. That was hard to take. I had arrived searching for one thing and kept finding another. How bureaucratic, I thought. But as my ego quieted, a more honest question surfaced: who should be addressing these issues in the first place?

In an era where “community engagement,” “co-creation,” and “mobilization” appear in almost every funding brief, it’s easy to idealize community-led action as inherently superior to government-led work. But the reality is more nuanced. Sometimes the better question isn’t how to get communities to do more. But why was that gap left open? What has kept governments from effectively delivering what they set out to deliver? Accepting that was the first step toward actually learning something.

2. Learning What Is There to Learn, Not What I Wanted to Learn

With expectations set aside, I went down the list and started scheduling interviews. This is where things got interesting.

People are so accustomed to being engaged with an agenda that it becomes what they expect when you reach out. After three probing questions in an hour, it’s tempting to start offering your own views, to say what you think they need, or what you believe would help. Resist that. Insist on agenda-free learning. Listen, ask curious questions, listen again. When you put your aims, your goals, and your sense of self to one side, you open up space for the other person to own the conversation and genuinely contribute.

One of the most consistent lessons from these conversations: anything you think is important and missing probably already exists somewhere. Someone is working on it. You just don’t know about it yet.

In academic settings or strategic forums, it’s common to hear statements like “a harmonized data platform would be so useful” or “we really need a forecasting model, a dashboard, a training program.” The problem is rarely that no one has had the idea. Nor that no one has acted. It’s that the path from idea to visible impact is full of obstacles, and those obstacles are not just lack of vision or know-how. Often, they’re the result of external pressures that quietly penalize collaboration, making it difficult for effort to materialize into anything others can see or build on.

Take Thailand for example. Dedicated projects exist to harmonize both environmental and health data. The Department of Disease Control built its own system for near-real-time case reporting. And yet legal interpretations of the Personal Data Protection Act have obstructed data flows even within the same ministry. Meanwhile, the same small crew of technical staff is tasked with every initiative simultaneously, stretched thin and forced to build systems that just barely work. When you reach out with yet another idea, you might be the tenth person to approach them with something like it. That’s not an obstacle to work around. That’s a wealth of experience to be tapped into: what has been tried, what went wrong, what would actually shift the odds.

There’s also the pressure to show progress. It’s visible in the growing ecosystem of apps and dashboards emerging from every party along the pipeline: data owners, aggregators, well-meaning peripheral actors. The need to demonstrate momentum drives the development of knowingly fragmented systems. Working within trusted circles, staying in silos, becomes the only sensible low-risk path forward.

So, listen. Truly listen. Understand people’s struggles and concerns. Learn from what they have already tried, what progress looks like to them, who they trust as allies. At some point, the stars begin to align, and meaningful next steps start to emerge on their own. Trust in the process.

3. The Year Ahead

With objectives clarified and a solid group of people from across the ecosystem on board, we can now chart a course through the obstacles. The goal is not to build from scratch, but to stitch together what we collectively have, rewiring incentives toward collaboration and wider, evidence-based participation.

The first priority is setting up a data community of practice, bringing together technical staff from regional and national offices to co-design ways of working together. This means shifting regional offices away from being relayers of frontline needs or developers of semi-redundant systems patching gaps unmet by the national system. Instead, they become context-embedded development powerhouses, capable of responding promptly to frontline requests using a tech stack that scales their contributions across the country through the national system.

In parallel, we will piece together existing infrastructure to create a modeling hub. Currently fragmented research teams will be able to submit their work for fair evaluation against real-world data and integration into public health use. Dengue early warning systems will serve as the pilot ground for this new collaborative work culture. Finally, we will work to influence existing capacity building efforts to embed CSID modeling as one of their core pillars.

The road will be rough. But trust built through listening will hold us together.

In summary, three lessons I carry: