Designing and Developing Community Interventions
Previous work within MEMA kwa Vijana identified a need for community interventions to support ongoing activities within schools and health facilities. Such a complementary intervention is needed to create an environment within the wider community that supports adolescent sexual and reproductive health activities in schools and health services, and strengthens community attitudes and behaviours that promote adolescent sexual and reproductive health.
A needs assessment showed that working with parents/caregivers and adult community members, on issues related to parenting and adolescent sexual and reproductive health, appeared to be a priority. The following ideas underline the development of community-based parenting activities:
- Intervention development needs to be context-specific. Community members made a strong case for developing interventions that consider the specificity of each village’s structures and group diversity.
- Community participation within intervention development will increase participants’ sense of responsibility and ownership, leading to a more sustainable intervention.
- It is important to closely work with authority structures, from sub-village to district and national level, to strengthen local capacity and integrate findings into regular programmes.
Designing and Developing Community Interventions (link to technical brief)
Research into how to design and develop community interventions identified the following factors as important:
- Ownership: Community participation in designing and implementation of intervention is a strategy for ownership
- Sustainability and Replication: Community intervention are not isolated entities and therefore require involvement of government structures at all levels
- Appropriate: Operational research will assist community and local government structures to identify and integrate successful programmes.