Title: Advantage of community participation
Course: Level 3 - Health Education and Promotion > Section: Community mobilization

You have learned about community participation in session 4 of this module. You should remember the concepts, principle and benefits of community participation. While you think about effective community mobilization it is necessary to employ effective community participation; because, all participations are not participation.

Community has different resources to deal/solve with existing health problem. During every program don't do everything for community rather helps them to solve their problem by their own effort and resource. Involving local people helps to increase the resources available for the programme, promotes self-help and self-reliance, and improves trust and partnership between the community and health workers.

Level of Community Participation

The extent of participation of community members in a program may be minimum or complete as ownership. It ranges from co-option to collective action (see Figure 14.7).

Fig 14.7 Community ownership and sustainability

This shows that as community participation increases, community ownership and capacity increases. These degrees of participations are

- Co-option: Local representatives are chosen, but have no real input or power
- Compliance: Tasks are assigned with incentives, but outsiders decide the agenda and direct the process.
- Consultation: Local opinions are asked for, and outsiders analyse and decide on a course of action.
- Cooperation: Local people work together with outsiders to determine realities; responsibility remains with outsiders for directing the process.
- Collective action: Local people set their own agenda and mobilise to carry it out, in the absence of outside initiators and facilitators
- Co-learning: Local people and outsiders share their knowledge to create a new understanding, and work together to form action plans, with outsiders facilitating.

There are two of the commonly used participatory tools community mapping and community conversation.

A. Community Mapping

During community mapping a map is drawn of selected physical features on a flat surface. The selected features for a village could be: The natural resource, the poverty patterns the territory of the village, the housing patterns, the cropping patterns, the space and the area the village occupies (See Figure 14.8 below).

Fig 14.8. Community mapping helps to identify community health

Community mapping is an assessment tool that can help communities and Health Extension Practitioners identify and understand the real situations in local communities that positively or negatively impact their health. The process of doing a community map is really important and can help people understand health problems in their community.

B. Community Conversation

People have the knowledge, capability and resources that can bring about positive health outcomes individually and collectively, once the community perceives ownership of a health problem.Community Conversations provide a safe space in which people come together for thoughtful discussion and dialogue about shared values (See Figure 14.6).

Fig 14.6. The process of community conversation gives community members ownership of their problems.