COPASAH – South Asia
Innovative Use of Technologies (ICTs) for Community Monitoring to Enhance Health Rights of the Community
(Workshop)
Date: January 8, 9 & 10, 2015 Venue: Bhopal No of participants: 30
Context
Community of Practitioners on Accountability and Social Action in Health (COPASAH) is a global network of practitioners with a common interest and passion for the field of community monitoring for accountability in health. COPASAH[1] was set up by a group of practitioners who had come together for a meeting to share experiences at Johannesburg in July 2011 and currently has a steering committee of 8 members from Asia, Africa and Latin America. COPASAH places a strong emphasis on the role of civil society to not only promote access to equitable, quality and accountable health services, but also to deepen democracy and strengthen citizens’ rights and entitlements.
COPASAH’s mission is to nurture, strengthen and promote collective knowledge, skills and capacity of community-oriented organisations and health activists – primarily from Africa, Asia and Latin America – working in the field of accountability and social action in health, for promoting active citizenship to make health systems responsive, equitable and people-centered.
COPASAH believes that in order to make our vision a reality, community monitoring for accountability in health must:
- enable communities facing inequities to assert their rights and to participate in concrete actions to bring about changes in health services and equitable distribution of resources
- give voice to peoples’ perspectives
- be an empowering process where actors related to the health system are encouraged to address power imbalances that affect people’s health
- be linked to an action or advocacy plan which aims to influence or change health policies and programs
The COPASAH community is growing in South Asia. There has been a considerable amount of processes which have taken place in India starting with a workshop in Mumbai in February 2013 and a South Asia region workshop in September 2013. This has been followed up with three Facilitated Learning Exchange events with three different contexts. Besides, through the health policy plan on community action, social accountability has received considerable attention. In this context, it has been proposed to encourage innovative measures to promote the practice of community monitoring.
Goal of the Workshop
The three day workshop intends to strengthen the community based monitoring work by using technology. Grass roots practitioners have been invited in the workshop to enhance skills and develop innovations, tools, thematic innovations, new constituencies for accountability practice in health using technology. The goal is to facilitate strengthening of the processes of social accountability practices and to strengthen the existing community of practitioners to innovate in community monitoring practices especially with the use of technology.
Specific Objectives
- To encourage young people to do innovative thinking, to energise practitioners and to explore new issues and constituency for accountability and community monitoring practice with the effective use of technology at the community level’
- To build the skills of young practitioners in using technology for Community Monitoring in health
Details of the Workshop
Based on the proactive involvement of COPASAH members in earlier processes as well as key leadership and participation in workshops and Facilitated Learning Exchange events, on the suggestions of the steering committee of COPASAH practitioners from six states of India including Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have been selected for the workshop. The workshop proposes to enhance the capacity of nearly 30 practitioners in Community Monitoring for health by using technology. A state will be represented by an organisation and from each organisation nearly four practitioners will be mentored in the workshop. The value addition aimed to the traditional Community Based Monitoring through this three day workshop would be capacity building of practitioners, as a move from theory to practice in learning use of technology to document evidences for accountability and social mobilisation. The practitioners will be trained to engage with audio visual tools and technology such as Photo Voices, cell phones, video cameras, video clippings from cell phones and other media tools such as SMS, website, blogs, face book etc.
The focus will be on new theme, innovation and group (collaborative) work in the workshop.
The workshop has been undertaken under the documentation of COPASAH project.
Some Guidelines on Requirement from participants
- Persons who have participated in COPASAH related workshops or processes and who are members of COPASAH
- It should be a collaborative effort involving not less than two organisations or individuals
- It should be around innovation and using technology (which is low cost and accessible to practitioners) in community based monitoring
- The basis of diversity of themes, proposed idea of innovations in methodology and in using technology will be shortlisted. Representation to different regions will be borne in mind.
- A maximum of four members from each of the selected organisation will be participating in a capacity building workshop which will be on using technology for community based monitoring. These trained people will be the key persons/ anchors for implementation of the process further.
- After the workshop each team will be required to submit a documentary proof of innovative use of technology. The collaborative effort and group process will be provided certain financial support as well as technical support to carry out the work, for logistics support and for dissemination (at the district and state levels) and for sharing experiences.
Some of the Guidelines for Using Technology
- Ethical guidelines of media and communication should be strictly adhered to. e.g. It should not be a sting operation, or video clippings done without the participation consent of the community
- It should focus on the evidence owned by the community and to promote the health rights and capacity of the community
- It should be collective effort with increasing participation by and ownership of the community
- The financial support will be for developing a method, field testing the tool and for documenting the innovation. Hence planning meetings, material resource, sharing meetings will be supported by the grant.
Outputs
- Report/ case studies (how did you do it) on using technology for community monitoring
- Any one technology based product: e.g. video story, photo story, audio-story etc. By each of the group which can also be used by others.