About the Toolkit

As part of the recommendations of Community engagement and supportive supervision gap analyses conducted in 2017 and the subsequent Community Engagement Guidelines for frontline health workers, the development of the Kiribati ‘How to Guides’ was made possible by the leadership of MHMS of Kiribati. The ‘How to Guides’ aim to provide a set of simple tools for health service providers to guide them in implementing Community Engagement activities and to facilitate a standardized approach to such implementation.

These Guides are the result of consultation meetings with stakeholders, NGOS, MHMS frontline health workers and communities led by MHMS and UNICEF.

This ‘How to Guides’ are meant primarily to guide the health worker in their day to day implementation of community engagement activities. In addition, the ‘How to Guides’ are meant to facilitate the monitoring and supportive role of Health Managers at the National level as well as the Medical Assistants at the Clinic level.

At the strategic level the ‘How to guides’ will support all frontline health workers who use the tools to ensure the community engagement standardization across Kiribati.

While each ‘Guide’ supports the health worker to implement an activity at the community level, they are designed to be complimentary and feed into each other to ensure the implementation of comprehensive community engagement activities at the community level. The ‘How to Guides’ also provides the health worker with an opportunity to be creative by combining the activities based on their individual context. To enable the health worker tap into these various aspects of the ‘How to Guides’, the following key steps are important to be taken by them:

1. Reading all the guides to be familiar on the content and steps for each guide
2. To pay attention to the suggested links at the top of each guide
3. To reflect on their clinic context and customize which activities can be implemented at the same time
4. To consult and share experiences with colleagues during coordination meetings
5. To document and include in reports key events that serve as mile stones in the implementation of activities