Kashtakari Sanghatana

Context

The Kashtakari Sanghatana is working in the tribal district of Thane in Maharashtra, India. It has been working in the area of community monitoring of health services for the past 15 years. In 1999-2000 it implemented a WHO project entitled Empowerment of Rural Poor for Better Health in which it first experimented with community Monitoring tools, organising village level meetings and setting up village level health monitoring committees. From 2007, it is part of the NRHM Community based Monitoring process and implements the same in two blocks (Dahanu and Mokhada) of Thane district. It trains village level committee members to monitor village level health services. It also monitors higher level institutions eg Rural Hospitals etc. It organises people's public Hearings frequently to focus on the inadequacies of the health services. It is continuously involved in advocacy work with the district health administration.

Website:

Area of Work:
Maharashtra, India

Contact Person:
Brian Lobo

Approaches to implementing Community monitoring/accountability

We focus on accountability continuously. In fact we focus on accountability in other areas than health as well, and so accountability in health services is a sub-set of our work. We organise training programmes of the village community in which we stress the concept of accountability and ownership. We organise village and primary health centre, taluka and district level meetings and Public hearings in which the local people raise issues pertaining to health services and directly question health officials and staff regarding problems and deficiencies. We also organise demonstrations.

Results and lessons

People can monitor local health services, but the involvement of the community at higher levels becomes minimal. People have proved effective at the local level but many major issues related to health policy have not been able to have been addressed.