Community mobilization action cycle

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 to understand what is currently happening in the community. Once the health issues are fully explored, you can set priorities, develop a more detailed plan of work, and carry out the plan. During the implementation of the programme, you should monitor and finally evaluate your activities.

This process of activities that people together is called community action cycle. The Community Action Cycle is a set of stages and steps that community members can follow to take action in a participatory and systematic way.(fig. 14.5)

• Prepare to mobilise - at this stage, you will learn about the communities in which they will work and the key issues/health problem. They come to understand the importance of the program.
• Organising community- establishes a relationship with the community and invite for participation. Plan and select a strategy together to solve the problem.
• Explore health issue and set priority- explore and discuss the issues to identify key actors and stakeholders (village chief, Imam, heads of families, etc.)
• Plan with the community- develop a Community Action Plan that sets out what action the community will take, who will be responsible and when actions will be taken. Mobilise these key actors and stakeholders for action (discussions and agreement on what to do).
• Act together- putting their plans into action and monitor the progress. Implement activities to work towards a solution (capitalise on the sensitization of the people created by the workshop and intensify this through various follow-up activities).
• Evaluate together- conduct participatory evaluations and thereby measure the impact of activities carried out to solve the problem.
• Prepare for scale up-Improve activities, based on the findings of the assessment. You can use findings to begin a new cycle. This is also the time to start sharing success stories.