Conceptualizing Community Mobilization for HIV Prevention

This paper aims to identify the key domains of community mobilization (CM) essential to change health outcomes or behaviors, and to determine whether these hypothesized CM domains were relevant to a rural South African setting.

We studied social movements and community capacity, empowerment and development literatures, assessing common elements needed to operationalize HIV programs at a community level. After synthesizing these elements into six essential CM domains, we explored the salience of these CM domains qualitatively, through analysis of 10 key informant in-depth-interviews and seven focus groups in three villages in Bushbuckridge.