Community Dialogues for Healthy Children: Encouraging Communities to Talk

Source: Malaria Consortium

Year of Publication:

2012

This paper looks at some key barriers to the early treatment of sick children identified by Malaria Consortium and the interventions developed to address them, with a focus on the community dialogue (CD) approach. The potential of CD to improve health outcomes has been largely recognized by practitioners and researchers. However, examples of how this works in practice in the ICCM context are rare. This paper describes the model developed by Malaria Consortium to trigger genuine dialogue within local communities about the management of selected childhood diseases. Initial lessons from the early stages of community dialogue implementation are outlined and it is proposed that an evaluation of the experiment should be allowed to contribute to efforts to identify good practices for effective community involvement in ICCM programming.