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Involvement of communities in the field of health research collectively known as community
engagement is considered as ethical conduct of research. At the Ifakara Health Research
Institute (IHI) in Bagamoyo, Tanzania, nothing has been documented on how the engagement
is being done and what community structures/networks are involved in the facilitation of
engagement activities, and what are the systematic functioning of these structures since the
formulation of community advisory board (CAB) in 2007. In this study six focus group
discussions (FGDs) and 19 in-depth interviews (IDIs) among respondents participated in IHI research
for the past five years were performed. Furthermore, focus groups and in-depths interview were
audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed using framework analysis techniques. This study found that;
engagement was more likely being influenced by the type of research project and kind of
participants needed, different community networks such as village executive officers,
community health workers, hamlet leaders, and community advisory boards were the key
stakeholders and; community-level public meetings, household visitation and informationgiving
sessions at the health facilities were the main approaches used during engagement
processes. However, it was found that they did not reach most of the target people due to
limited levels of interaction with potential participants, there are no central coordination of the
engagement activities at the Institute, different research projects at the same Institute have
been approaching these structures separately, little engagement, misunderstanding of the
research objectives have been reported in contributing to the participants dropout. This study
recommends that there is a need of developing a community engagement unit that would work
across projects to support engagement with the community. |
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