“Strengthening community focused, primary health care oriented approaches to social accountability and action”
| The training specifically aimed: To build an understanding of PRA approaches and their use in strengthening people centred health systems To draw on experiences in the east and southern African region for strengthening community focused and PHC oriented approaches to community roles in social accountability and action. To work through practical examples of PRA approaches and their application in areas of work that participants are involved with at community level. To provide initial mentoring and support to development of research and training proposals in this field. To strengthen participant engagement in the COPASAH and EQUINET networks in the interest of deepening knowledge, debate and actions on issues of health equity and social justice. |  |
The training used an existing EQUINET training toolkit on ‘Organising People’s Power for Health’ produced by TARSC and Ifakara Health Institute (IHI, Tanzania) in 2005. This toolkit (called the ‘PRA toolkit’ in this report) is separately available2 and provides details on many of the sessions and how they were conducted, so this report does not record this information. As a training workshop using PRA methods, the meeting involved dialogue and exchange of experiences, activities to encourage reflection and discussions on follow up, lessons learned and many other activities (see the full programme in Appendix Two). This report cannot do justice to the rich and diverse exchanges that took place in the meeting, but we have tried to capture through quotes and pictures some of these exchanges and the major agreed areas of action and reflection arising from the meeting.
Our facilitators for different sessions of the meeting were Barbara Kaim from TARSC, Robinah Kaitiritimba from the Uganda National Health Consumers/Users Organisation (UNHCO), and Clara Mbwili and Adah Zulu from the Lusaka District Health Management (LDHMT) Team in the Ministry of Health in Zambia. This report was prepared by TARSC, with support from Isabella Matambanadzo.
The 28 participants, representing 18 organisations from 7 countries – that is, from Kenya, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe – brought a diversity of skills, experience and knowledge from different work contexts. We were community health activists, civil society organisation reps, health workers, people working in state health departments, academics and researchers. We came from different parts of the region and left as a learning community!