All communities (populations of people living in a confined geographical area, either in villages or towns, but with the same chieftaincy or political administration) have community-based surveillance volunteers (CBSVs), selected by their communities to support district health management teams (DHMTs) in community mobilization for health programmes.
3. Community mobilization Community involvement was crucial to the project.
Community mobilization approaches, cutting across all programmes, were essential to AVAHAN's programme design.
The strategies involved included using Security Council Resolution 1612 as an advocacy tool, strategic coordination, an integrated programme approach, community mobilization and working in partnership.
Informed by the feasibility study, the cash transfer programme was designed to promote community engagement, with community-based cash transfer committees (CTCs) playing an active role in administering the programme (including community mobilization, beneficiary selection process, cash distributions, verification of compliance with conditions).
For the first time, it has been shown, with a prospective design, that a large scale targeted HIV prevention programme, including standardized programme packages reinforced with community mobilization approaches, is possible and works.
The programme consisted of four components: limited community mobilization; a teacher-led, peer-assisted curriculum of 10 15 40-min sessions per year for the three upper years of primary school (http://www.memakwavijana.org); training and supervision of health facility clinicians to encourage youth friendliness; and the marketing of subsidised condoms by out-of-school youth [ 11, 12].
PMTCT programmes should make clinics and VCCT centres more youth-friendly, and enhance community mobilization and information-education-communication (IEC) activities to promote VCCT among youths.
At community level, promotions that can be done include "mass campaigns" on couple HIV testing, use of key and influential people to promote MI [ 19, 45], mass media campaigns such as television programmes [ 45] on MI, community mobilization [ 39] and involvement [ 26], male peers reaching to other men [ 46] and community based programme and support [ 26].
Our findings are consistent with those from previous studies on the value of social capital [11,31], social networks and community mobilization [32] to support externally introduced programmes in African settings.
