Phase 3: Explore the Health Issue and Set Priorities



Before this stage in the community mobilization (CM) process, you should have selected and begun to develop your core group (made up of members from the community). Now it's time for you to work with this group to jointly explore the issue or health focus of the community mobilization effort and set priorities.

STEP 1: Decide the objectives for this phase

Before you begin your CM program team will need to determine the objectives of this exploration phase. Remember that your objectives should be directly related to the overall program goal.

STEP 2: Explore the health issue with the core group

This exploration phase begins with an in-depth examination of the health issue with core group members in order to learn as much as possible about their current feelings, knowledge, practices and beliefs related to the issue and their capacity to address their needs. Once you have been able to bring the core group together, it's time to start learning what they know and how they feel about the health issue.

Before you start asking questions, you will need to spend some time helping the group develop a common vocabulary to talk about the health issue. The questions you ask the core group should be organized around the topics to be explored in this step: the feelings, knowledge, attitudes, practices, and beliefs of the community concerning the health issue-the community perspective, in short, based on members' experiences and circumstances.

STEP 3: Together with the core group, explore the health issue with the broader community

Just as the program team planned for the core group exploration process, now the core group (with assistance from the program team) needs to plan for the exploration process within the broader community. One of the decisions your team will need to make here is to determine to what extent the core group will be involved in developing and/or participating in this exploration process. Keep in mind that the greater the involvement from the community in setting their own agenda and mobilizing to carry it out, the more likely it is that change will be sustained. Whoever participates in this exercise, the group will initially need to decide three important things about this activity:
  1. Objectives: What is it that we want to learn about this health issue in the broader community and why? What are our other objectives (raise community awareness, broaden community participation, involve local leaders, etc.)?

  2. Methods: How will we gather and use this information? Does it already exist or do we need to collect it? Who will be responsible for organizing, coordinating, collecting, consolidating and analyzing the information?

  3. Resources: Which human, financial and material resources will we need to carry out the assessment? What resources do we have now? What resources will we need to get? How will we get them? Are there specialists in monitoring and evaluation, epidemiology, social science, anthropology, sociology and other related disciplines that can help us?
The team will need to select various methods and tools appropriate for gathering information in your particular setting. Your choice of tools will depend on your project's objectives, your team's skill and the dynamics and characteristics of the community with which you are working. We recommend a combination of both quantitative and qualitative methods to best support community learning.

STEP 4: Analyze the information

During this step, groups should organize the information they have collected so they can use it to better understand the issue, identify priorities and monitor progress in the future. There are a variety of methods you can use to organize information that has been collected. The methods you choose will depend on the amount of information you have to analyze, the level of accuracy and complexity necessary or desired for the analysis, the level of education and skills of participants, the extent to which capacity building is an objective, and the time and resources available.

STEP 5: Set priorities for action

If the community mobilization health issue is defined broadly, the exploration phase is likely to uncover a large variety of potential priorities to choose from. To decide which priorities the community will focus on immediately in the upcoming planning phase, participants will need to establish some criteria. The team and core group should review the information gathered to rank the possible priorities until there is general agreement. It is best to try to limit the number of priorities to two or three in order to focus the group's effort.

Now that you have jointly explored the health issue to learn more about it, its causes and what people are doing about it, you are ready to develop strategies with the community to address it.