19.6  The action cycle of community mobilisation

You should start the mobilisation process by organising your plan of work with the community. After that you can explore all the most important health issues in order to understand what is currently happening in the community. In addition, you can identify why any specific problems are occurring. You should look for helpful or harmful health practices, beliefs, attitudes and knowledge within that community that are related to the health problem under consideration. Once the health issues are fully explored, you can set priorities, develop a more detailed plan of work, and carry out the plan. During implementation of the programme, you should monitor and finally evaluate your activities. If the programme seems successful, you should think about how you could scale up that method to a larger number of households. In this way, the action continues. These activities are known as the community action cycle (Figure 19.8). An example of how it works is described below the diagram.

Figure 19.8  The community action cycle.