Measuring participation: its use as a managerial tool for district health planners based on a case study in Tanzania

This paper looks specifically at how a framework that was developed to measure the level of community participation within district health projects can be implemented. The introductory section describes the evolution of the development of the framework designed by Rifkin et al in 1988. The framework basically centres on the identification of five main factors that Rifkin believed to most strongly influence the breadth of community participation. These were identified as: a) needs assessment b) leadership c) organisation d) resource mobilisation and e) management. The article goes on to describe how research was carried out to find out how health programme staff utilised the framework to assess community participation levels. A major reason for this research was to assess exactly how valuable a tool this framework is by asking project managers to apply it in their own specific contexts. The article gives a detailed description of the setting in which the research took place before discussing the study procedure in some detail and briefly reporting the results. The main strengths and weaknesses of the framework were highlighted and the implications of these findings discussed in some detail.