Female Courtyard Strategy for Polio Communication

This brief report, presented at the Afghanistan Communication Review for Southern and Eastern Afghanistan in Kabul, July 14-15 2008, outlines the background and early impact of a strategy to reach caregivers of children under five years old using peer outreach within private courtyards. Based on identification of gaps in knowledge and practice resulting from an inability to directly communicate with women in Afghanistan, the courtyard strategy was implemented to gain the direct involvement of household women (mothers, sisters, grandmothers) who are caregivers of under-five children. The ultimate goal was to improve national immunisation day (NID) coverage in the Eastern Region in both Metherlam and Jalalabad.

The strategy implemented the following activities:

• Selection of women courtyard mobilisers (per street/lane/courtyard).
• Training by Provincial Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) Management Team (PEMT) staff of female community health workers.
• Consultation meeting among female community members in their courtyards before NIDs.
• Assistance during NIDs by women courtyard mobilisers.
• Follow up - holding courtyard discussions with women courtyard mobilisers.
• Feedback to PEMT.

An assessment was conducted on July 13th 2008 with 270 randomly selected households by 20 trained female health workers or social mobilisers. The outcome of the survey indicated that female members of the households/communities tend to either credit their source of information as coming from television (for the urban population) or from conversations with women courtyard members. Other sources, such as teachers, community leaders, and mullahs, were of lesser significance. The assessment points to the importance of strategies that reach women in their private courtyards and recommends that such activities be scaled up.

Click here to download the full report as a Word document.

Click here to download supporting analysis data in Word format.