Student
Dissertation 1st Batch 
Increasing coverage of intervention through a voluntary cadre of workers known as Community Resource Persons.
Nabeel Ashraf Ali
Abstract
The current study is nested into an ongoing cluster randomized community trial in the northeastern district of Sylhet in Bangladesh titled “Community-Based Interventions to Reduce Neonatal Mortality in Bangladesh.” The overarching objective of the project is, if the interventions are successful, then Government of Bangladesh (GoB) would be duly recommended to scale them up on a national level. There are two distinct study arms with differing interventions and one arm with no interventions (comparison). Two year experience of the intervention trial showed that HC arm interventions have been markedly successful but the same cannot be said about the CC arm. The hypothesis has been: the interventions in HC arm are more input-intensive than in CC arm. This is the primary reason why another component was added to the CC arm in order to increase the effectiveness of the intervention there. This new component is the introduction of Community Resource Persons (CRPs). This addition was also deemed as moving closer to the idea of true community mobilization, where people take ownership of the interventions. The basic idea is to create a voluntary cadre of change agents composed of women from the community to disseminate some parts of the behavioral interventions into the community during the absence of assigned cadre of workers (CMs). In addition to the above, two paramedics have been employed through the project to provide minimum level of antenatal care services (ANC) to the pregnant mothers in areas where government services are lacking.
