The Centre for Communication Impact (CCI) in its approach, recognizes that for communities to take ownership of their own health outcomes, they need to be capacitated and resourced to take responsibility for ensuring that individuals within the community comply with COVID-19 Government-issued regulations, and ultimately their own health.
Leveraging the “We Care Programme” to influence adoption and sustenance of positive behaviours in mining communities of South Africa.
The project addresses the COVID-19 pandemic in communities and within homes, through social cohesion and a Positive Deviance (PD) approach that encourages constructive, innovative but successful behaviors that lead to solutions and ultimately, positive change in their groups – despite lack of resources.
In partnership with Anglo American, CCI works with the Community Oriented Primary Care (COPC) team from the University of Pretoria and other stakeholders in targeted Anglo American mining communities to develop and implement a capacity building plan for community stakeholders to either strengthen existing or establish new platforms to address COVID-19.
The Programme Goal
To galvanize the community assets, power and voice as enablers of behavior change in support of the prevention, response and recovery from COVID-19 in Anglo American mining communities.
Programme Objectives
Objective 1
Build capacity of local stakeholders to prevent and respond to COVID-19 in their communities
Objective 2
Promote an environment where communities and key influencers support and individuals adopt positive COVID-19 prevention behaviours
Main Activities of the Programme
- Host a workshop with local stakeholders at community level to contextualize the Positive Deviance Approach coupled with Participatory Community Goal Setting and Monitoring for the mining communities.
- Work with local stakeholders to establish 20 Community Action Groups (CAGs) – groups where members drive interventions locally (to ensure community ownership)
- Train CAGs (drawn from community structures) on Positive Deviance Approach coupled with Participatory Community Goal Setting and Monitoring.
- Conduct monthly meetings for goal setting and stock-take on previous month targets.
- Disseminate COVID-19 messages to community members through existing and impactful media platforms – Each CAG member reaches 30 families in a month (an average of 180 people a month) with interpersonal communication.
- To reduce stigma against people that are diagnosed and/or affected with COVID-19.
- Ensure that individuals and communities practice positive behaviours related to COVID-19 prevention.
- Ensure that community members have the capacity to sustain behaviour change interventions post AA-CCI support.
- Work with government authorities to identify abuse cases and referrals to support mechanisms and promote access to GBV services while encouraging the use of the national call center to get help and additional information.
- Monitor and evaluate the intervention
Ensuring community ownership through Positive Deviance and Participatory Community Goal Setting
The PD concept is based on the observation that in every community or organization, there are a few individuals or groups whose uncommon but successful behaviors and strategies have enabled them to find better solutions to problems than their neighbors who face the same challenges and barriers and have access to same resources.
The PD approach is a problem solving, asset-based approach grounded in the fact that communities have assets or resources they haven’t tapped. It enables a community or organization to amplify uncommon behaviors or strategies discovered by community members among the least likely to succeed (positive deviants), develop some activities or initiatives based on these findings and measure outcomes.
Participatory goal setting enables partners to put their differences on the table early on so that conflicts can be openly resolved or at least managed, rather than festering beneath the surface.
Engaging conflict constructively strengthens partnerships by fostering mutual appreciation of difference and finding ways of exploiting the relative strengths, as well as compensating for the weaknesses, of each partner.
