Perceptions and experiences of community-networks that facilitate engagement in health research: Ifakara Health Institute-Bagamoyo case-study

Abstract

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.