When the science is not enough: the case for strategic communications in public health, climate, and research
There is a quiet crisis running alongside every major research breakthrough of our time. Scientists publish; institutions report and funders receive their deliverables. But somewhere between the laboratory and the communities that need the information most, the knowledge stops moving. This is not a failure of science. It is a failure of communication. And it is one that we can no longer afford. The Historical Gap This gap has existed for a long time. Research institutions, development organisations, and global health bodies have spent decades producing work of extraordinary quality. Papers are written with frameworks designed and evidence is gathered. But the translation, the deliberate, strategic effort to move knowledge from expert circles into the hands of the people who need to act on it, has rarely been treated as a core function. It has been treated as a footnote, where it is even considered at all. Such projects typically end with a press release, a summary report for the funder and a social media post that reaches the people who were already informed. The structural assumption has been that good research will find its audience – just as in the business world, many assume that a good product would announce itself. History has shown us, repeatedly, that this is simply not true. What the crises taught us The COVID-19 pandemic was the most devastating public health event in over one hundred years. It did not just reveal the limits of health systems. It showed how critical health communication is. Governments issued guidelines that contradicted each other. Institutions published data that the public could not interpret. Communities, left without clear, accessible information, filled the gap with rumour, fear, and misinformation. Within weeks, every politician, every civil servant, every business leader, and every concerned parent had become an emergency communicator. None of them were prepared for it. But COVID was not an isolated case. It was a confirmation. Mpox outbreaks have continued to spread across parts of Central and West Africa, in communities that received fragmented public information about transmission, prevention, and treatment. Cholera, a disease we have understood for over a century, continues to kill people across the continent, often in settings where early, accessible communication about water safety and oral rehydration could have changed outcomes. In each of these situations, the science existed. The intervention protocols existed. The gap was not knowledge; it was communication. Climate change presents the same paradox at a different scale. Research institutions and global programmes produce volumes of data every year about rising temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, crop failure projections, and the long-term economic consequences of inaction. The evidence is overwhelming and well-documented. But the farmers in northern Nigeria watching their yields fall, the smallholder producers in Zambia whose seasons no longer behave as expected, the coastal business owners in Lagos watching the Atlantic move closer every year, they are living the findings that researchers are publishing. They are not reading the journals. The research and the reality exist in parallel. They rarely intersect in a meaningful way. What has to change The structural problem is that communications has been positioned as a finishing touch rather than a foundation. Funders design programmes. Institutions hire researchers and field teams. Project plans are built around data collection, analysis, and reporting. Communications, when it appears at all, shows up late in the process, often as a dissemination task assigned to whoever is available. This has to change, and it has to change at the level of programme design. Strategic communications must be integrated from day one. Not as a reporting function, but as a programme function. Every research project that aims to drive behaviour change, inform policy, or shift public understanding needs to ask these questions at the start: Who are the stakeholders? What do they currently believe? What do they need to understand? Through which channels do they receive and trust information? What format will reach them? Those questions are not communications questions in isolation. They are research design questions. They shape methodology, language, dissemination channels, and ultimately, impact. Stakeholder segmentation matters here. The communication that reaches a policymaker in Abuja is not the same communication that serves a community health worker in Kano. The language that moves a development finance institution is not the language that moves a woman attending a health outreach in Kisumu. Strategic communications is the discipline of holding all of those audiences simultaneously and designing for each of them with the same rigour applied to the underlying research. The digital layer and the role of AI We are also navigating a profound shift in how information flows. Digital communications has changed the architecture of public understanding. Information now travels faster than institutions can respond. A false claim about vaccine safety can circle the continent before a health authority publishes a correction. A climate narrative built on partial data can shape policy conversations before the full evidence is available. At the same time, technology and artificial intelligence are creating new possibilities for how research outputs are translated and distributed. AI tools can now summarise complex findings in plain language across multiple formats. They can support multilingual content development, personalise messaging for different audience segments, and model the likely reach and resonance of different communication approaches. But these tools do not operate themselves. They require strategy. They require people who understand both the research and the audiences, and who can direct technology towards outcomes. Institutions and projects that are not building this capability now will find themselves behind a communications curve that is moving very quickly. The work ahead I have spent my career at the intersection of strategic communications and institutional development. I work with leaders, organisations, and institutions to translate complex realities into clear, purposeful communication. Increasingly, I find myself drawn to the work that sits at the edge of what communications has traditionally served. Public health. Climate research. Development programming. Scientific institutions operating across Africa. This is where the gap is most consequential. And it is where strategic communications