Table 2 Intervention types
Social accountability approach | Intervention type (i.e., social accountability mechanism) | Definition | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
Participatory policy and budget analysis | Aid chain partnership | Aid chain partnerships are partnerships between international, governmental and civil society organisations to determine the distribution of international aid [1]. | Cambodia [1] |
Participatory public expenditure/input tracking | Social audit | A social audit process engages both service providers and communities to assess performance of health facilities against national service delivery standards [2]. | Zambia [2] |
Participatory healthcare service performance monitoring, evaluation, and quality improvement | Community-based monitoring | This aims to improve public services by encouraging people to document the availability, accessibility, and quality of public services against specific commitments or standards. | |
Community-linked maternal death review | This was described as, “an alternative community-linked maternal death review (MDR) system combining the strengths of facility-based MDR and community verbal autopsy”. [8, p. 2] | Malawi [8] | |
Community mobilisation for improved health, equity and rights. | Community mobilisation can be defined as, “…community members taking collective action to achieve a common goal related to health, equity and rights”. [9, p. 60] | ||
Community reporting hotline | These were free telephone hotlines for reporting poor service provision. This was implemented in India to enable women to report demands for informal payments [13]. | India [13] | |
Evidence for action | The E4A programme supported multiple interventions in six countries (Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania) including scorecards, dashboards, and maternal death reviews (MDRs). | Multi-site (Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania) [14, 15] | |
Report cards | Data are collected from community members, often through a household survey, to rate a local health facilities performance against existing or pre-determined indicators and made available to communities in facilitated sessions using citizen report cards | ||
Scorecards | Community members collectively identity and prioritize their concerns and barriers with local health services and then work with local health providers to jointly develop actions to address and monitor the issues. They differ from report cards in that the community determines what the priorities should be whereas report cards report against existing standards. | ||
Strengthening health communities (multi-method) | Strengthening health communities involves multiple accountability mechanisms aimed at strengthening the influence and representation of communities in improving their health systems. |