Prepare To Mobilize

STEP 4: Identify resources and constraints.

Now that you know more about the health issue and the community, you will need to do an inventory of the resources that will be available to the program and any constraints you may face. You and your team should complete a simple worksheet where you list resources according to the following categories:

• Financial resources: project budget, income from all sources, including municipal government, the private sector, Ministry of Health funds, and nonprofit organizations.
• Human resources and the types of skills they can contribute: skilled project staff, collaborating organizations’ staff/members, community members willing to work on the project, and others.
• Material resources: meeting space, supplies, meals, computers, vehicles, other equipment, office space.
• Time.

After you identify resources, you should then identify what constraints you may face in carrying out the effort and ways to eliminate, minimize, or work around these constraints. In many cases, of course, constraints will be directly related to resources. For example, constraints might be that project staff do not possess the skills to do the work, that there is insufficient time to achieve the desired results through a high quality program, or that there are very limited financial or material resources.

Constraints may also arise from seasonal, geographic, political, or logistical difficulties. For example, the communities with which you propose to work are located in a region that is only accessible during six months of the year because floods knock out the bridge during the rainy season. Planting and harvesting may rule out work with some communities during three or four months as community members are too busy to attend meetings and engage in other activities. And you may also run into political constraints, cultural constraints, or language-related constraints. Try to anticipate as many of these as you can. After you have identified the resources you will need and the constraints you face, you should decide where you will get the former and how you will address the latter. In making these decisions, you will in some cases have to change or even eliminate certain activities that are simply not feasible given your situation. Alternatively, some programs may face the challenge of managing excessive budgets which can create great pressure on program managers to expend them, regardless of potential consequences such as unsustainable incentives, inflated community and health service provider expectations, distortion of the local economy, and other similar problems. You should not hesitate to adapt your plan in light of a realistic assessment of your circumstances. It’s much better to make these changes now, in the early stages of your preparation, than after you have launched the mobilization effort and raised expectations.