The agriculture-health-environment system (AHES) is a system that counteracts health problems in a community, such as malaria, whose causes are multi-factorial, emerging from the interaction of agriculture and environment, and whose solutions are through cross-sector cooperation of organizations, such as hospitals, community clinics, and irrigation departments that respond to counteract it. The system’s overall objective is to improve the health, social, and economic wellbeing of the target community. The AHES is characterized by a set of organizations that have complex linkages between them. These linkages enable agriculture, health, and environment organizations to generate, disseminate and use data, information, knowledge, and draw resources to counteract a community problem. By defining the linkages, learning about the problem and its solutions across organizations can be hastened giving impetus to the process of change in organizations and in the system. This study introduces a conceptual framework developed using a systems methodology to define the AHES, its component organizations, and their linkages. It then illustrates the application of the conceptual framework to describe a model AHES in the context of its organizational linkages for malaria control.
