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Project Summary
Engaging citizens and communities to make services accountable is vital to achieving health development goals. Community participation in health management committees can increase public accountability of health services. We conducted a cluster randomised controlled trial to test the impact of strengthened health management committees (HMCs) and community mobilisation through women's groups, on institutional deliveries and deliveries by a trained health worker in rural Nepal.
The study was conducted in all Village Development Committee clusters in the hilly district of Makwanpur, Nepal (population of 420,500). In 21 clusters intervention clusters we conducted three-day workshops with HMCs to improve their capacity for planning and action, and supported female community health volunteers to run 203 women's groups. These groups met once a month and mobilised communities to address barriers to institutional delivery. We compared this intervention with 22 control clusters.