community engagement
Promoting an integrated, multi-sectoral, community approach to providing locally accessible services for mothers and children.
priority issues
Community engagement issues:
– Promoting an integrated, multi-sectoral, community approach.
– Making health care services accessible to remote populations.
– Addressing multiple problems by decentralizing service provision and management to the community, making it the main operating unit.
– Improving the skills of community health workers by promoting health and the provision of preventive and curative health services.
– Fostering greater involvement of target populations, particularly in decentralized monitoring, and helping communities bring together stakeholders (political, administrative and community leaders; civil society organizations; development partners and donors) and manage the Agenda of Sustainable Development Goals.
Activities
Promoting family practices essential for children’s survival and development.
Providing preventive and curative health care services at a community level, supported by community health workers.
Decentralizing monitoring to identify problems and manage health services more effectively.
Monitoring and evaluating community-based interventions to document new policies and strategies.
Strategies
implemented
ESSENTIAL FAMILY PRACTICES
- Studies on knowledge, attitudes and practices to better understand the factors that encourage their adoption.
- Assistance communicating with local authorities, religious leaders, community health workers, the media, local radio, etc.
- Reinforcing a community-based approach with the community at the center of dialogue, diagnosis and decision-making.
Preventive interventions implemented at a community level with the help of community health workers, in the form of services provided regularly to the most remote populations (distribution of contraceptives and micronutrient powders, help with organizing vitamin A supplement campaigns and, in Togo and Chad, deworming campaigns, and the chemoprevention of seasonal malaria in Benin, Niger, Chad, Togo and other countries).
The provision of curative health care services at a community level to combat infant mortality. Implementation of services mainly targeted at the integrated management of the three main illnesses that kill children under the age of five (pneumonia, malaria and diarrhea).
DECENTRALIZED MONITORING
Decentralizing monitoring to increase community participation in identifying problems and managing health services more effectively. This approach has been developed and implemented in two countries (Benin and Togo). The widespread implementation and sustainability of this monitoring remains a major challenge in all countries.
STUDIES AND ASSESSMENTS
Studies, research and assessments undertaken to determine, document and evaluate the progress made by implementing community-based interventions. Most of the target countries have carried out studies on the underlying causes, barriers and factors involved in facilitating the adoption of behaviors conducive to maternal, newborn and child health.
SOME OF OUR ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Improving community capabilities is a long-term, effective approach encouraged in all the strategies and projects implemented by the French Muskoka Fund.
Guinea: Involving religious leaders in promoting mother and child health.
Mali: In Kita Circle in the Kayes region, adolescents and young people were responsible for promoting Essential Family Practices.
Niger: The introduction of community self-diagnosis.
Chad: Mobilization and commitment by traditional and religious leaders to prevent child marriage and promote Essential Family Practices.
Togo: Community-produced heath promotion videos. Successful trial of seasonal malaria chemoprevention in the region bordering Burkina Faso (Savanes). The health minister has extended this initiative to two other regions (Centrale and Kara), thereby covering all the requirements of those regions close to the Sahel.
Les pays
Contact us
To contact us, complete the form below and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
