Introducing CACH: Child Agency for Community Health

Children for Health is pleased to launch CACH, our Research, Evidence and Learning platform, to deepen understanding of how children’s health literacy and agency contribute to healthier families and communities.

Children bring knowledge, experiences and ideas that can help shape health education and action. At Children for Health, recognising this contribution is central to our work. We support children to learn about health, share what they know and take an active role in their communities.

CACH builds on this work by strengthening the evidence behind it and creating opportunities to learn together.

Why CACH?

How does learning about health help children take action? What enables them to influence health within their families and communities? What difference does their participation make, and under what conditions?

These questions matter for everyone designing, delivering or supporting health programmes with children.

CACH will explore how children’s health literacy—their ability to access, understand and use health information—and their agency—their ability to make choices and act on matters affecting their lives—can contribute to health and wellbeing.

Our aim is to understand what works, where challenges remain and how that learning can inform policy and practice.

Connecting Research with Practice

CACH’s work will focus on four areas:

• Research and evidence generation: Exploring how children’s health literacy and agency influence family and community health, using participatory approaches that recognise children as partners in learning and change.
• Monitoring, evaluation and learning: Strengthening how Children for Health programmes collect and use evidence to understand progress and improve delivery.
• Sharing and applying knowledge: Making findings accessible through digests, reports, practical resources and opportunities for discussion.
• Strengthening capacity and partnerships: Supporting partners to generate evidence and bringing together people with complementary expertise to learn from one another.

We hope to connect academics, educators, health professionals and community partners with a shared interest in children’s contribution to health. Combining research expertise with practical experience will help us ask useful questions and develop learning that people can apply in their own settings.

Our First Research & Learning Digest

The first Children for Health: Research & Learning Digest is planned for December 2026.

It will explore children’s participation in developing health education resources, considering what the evidence tells us and what this means for practice. Alongside learning from programmes, the digest will create space for wider perspectives and questions for future exploration.

The digest is one part of CACH’s broader work to connect evidence, dialogue and action.