Community Entry The project was introduced into the sub-district through the Keta District Health Directorate. The district director of health services, who was a
collaborator on the project, informed selected communities and together with community leaders planned for stakeholders’ durbar in each of the four study communities. At these durbars, the project was officially introduced to the entire community members by the research team, where they took advantage to sensitize the people and asked for their support and cooperation. After explaining every aspect of the project, community members were given opportunity to buy Hydroxychloroquine ask questions to which appropriate answers were provided. The target population for the project was children from 6 to 60 months old. The issue of why children alone were covered by the intervention came up for discussions and it was made known to the people that children are the most vulnerable to malaria and therefore needed protection. Community Assistants (CAs) Selection At the durbars, communities were asked Selleckchem GDC-0199 to nominate two volunteers each to serve as project CAs
who will deliver the interventions. The qualifications requested of a CA were to be able to read and write clearly, not involved in active politics and must have integrity in the eyes of the community leaders. Besides the CAs (two per community) an assemblyman (local government representative) was selected as a supervisor. All children aged 6 to 60 months old in the chosen communities whose parents/caregivers consented participated in the project. At the beginning of the intervention, 413 children were recruited into the study and this had increased GPX6 to 433 by the end of the study. No caregiver dissented participation. However, when a child attained 60 months, he/she was taken out of the study. Data collection This was a descriptive cross-sectional study using both qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques. Semi-structured questionnaire was administered to 105 randomly selected caregivers. Simple random sampling technique was used to select respondents
from the community register compiled for the intervention and regularly updated. The four communities had a total of 351 Caregivers (Galo-Sota 114, Agbatsivi 57, Agortoe 73 and Salo 107) whose children were enrolled into the project. About 30% of Caregivers in each community were selected to participate in this study. Focus group discussion was organized with nine Community Assistants (CAs) and 16 in-depth interviews were conducted with 16 opinion leaders (four per community). FGD and in-depth interview respondents were purposively selected as key informants. All the tools were translated into the local language (Ewe) and pretested in a community with similar characteristics before the actual data collection was done.