USAID Advancing Nutrition partnered with Akule ndi Thanzi (“Let them grow healthy”), a USAID Malawi-funded nutrition project, to facilitate a participatory, user-centered research and design process to develop and test transferable solutions to improve the quality of peer support groups. The research aimed to contribute to global and national learning on peer support groups. The process engaged care group participants and stakeholders through multiple exploratory workshops to validate existing research on care groups in Malawi, co-create possible solutions, and then revise and iterate solutions.

This brief shares the solutions (“prototypes”) developed by group participants and lessons learned from the design process (table 1). The prototypes may be useful to health and nutrition programs and practitioners aiming to strengthen their own programming with peer support groups.