Community engagement for resilient health systems
Public health is at an important crossroad. Although, there is no universally agreed definition of “community engagement” within the health sector, there is growing recognition that community engagement has a wide reach that can fundamentally influence the direction and quality of public health implementation efforts.
The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa - the world’s largest and most protracted Ebola response in history - reinforced that “context” and “culture” matter. The experience underscored the interdependent and reciprocal relationship between health service providers and health service users. The actions or inactions of service providers and response teams deeply impacted community trust, understanding and reactions.
In addition, four decades of health programme implementation experience ranging from immunization to maternal and child health and more recently health emergencies, has shown that there are conceptual, technical, programmatic and structural barriers to scaling-up and institutionalizing existing models of best practice in community engagement, participation and ...