Across the globe, stark disparities exist in several indicators of maternal and child health, demonstrating that the chances of survival for mothers and children are ultimately determined by where they are born and live. Sustainable and effective strategies for removing the barriers to safe and affirmative motherhood and childhood are therefore urgently required. This paper examines a community‐based intervention for improving maternal and child health outcomes in a predominantly rural area of the KwaZulu‐Natal province of South Africa. The central aim of the research was to explore the views and experiences of both community members and the health workers involved in the collaborative health intervention between two nongovernmental organisations—Humana People‐to‐People and the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund—in the five‐year period between 2017 and 2021. In this paper, focus is directed specifically at the health workers, fifteen of whom were recruited to participate in semistructured face‐to‐face interviews. These primary data, together with a range of secondary data sources, revealed the importance of community empowerment for enhancing the community’s health. Nine domains for evaluating the nature and extent to which community empowerment is facilitated in the context of a community development programme were thus identified and applied to the analysis of the data. The paper shows that the intervention was successful in at least six of the nine domains of community empowerment. The remaining three domains, which together facilitate long‐term sustainability of the benefits of a community intervention such as this, were insufficiently addressed and therefore raise concerns about the possible effects on the community’s health in the future.
Hagemeier et al. (Thu,) studied this question.