Faith-based organizations (FBOs)
can help empower the community to actively participate in improving the health
condition of the society. The Comprehensive Rural Health project in Jamkhed,
India is an example of how FBOs and churches can influence the health of a
community (Chand & Patterson, 2007) . Educating the
people and influencing their behavior to choose what is healthy and beneficial
to the community are strong contributions of churches and FBOs. One such field
in public health is the increasing cases of maternal death around the world
where the church can positively contribute to its reduction. This has been the
contribution of the FBOs in India where the communities where empowered to
choose facility-based deliveries with skilled birth attendants to reduce
maternal death (Chand & Patterson, 2007) .
It is important to measure the
contribution of FBOs and any other agencies in empowering the community. Community
empowerment can be measured using the five domains of empowerment including
confident, inclusive, organized, cooperative, and influential (Community
Development Exchange, 2008) . We measure
empowerment because it is important to assess if there is real community
empowerment that happens in the community after health promotion programs. Real
community empowerment needs a shift of power to the people where they are the
ones who are able to identify the problem, sort through it, and find solutions
to the problem (Lord & Hutchinson, 1993) . An example of a
strong involvement of the people is the community-based participatory research.
This type of involvement allows learning, research finding and dissemination of
results through the help of all actors in the community (Thompson,
Viswanath, Molina, Warnecke, & Prelip, 2016) . We see such kind of
participatory research in Gbanko. In this area, community participation in
health has dramatically reduced their maternal mortality rate (Gala, Umar,
& Dandeebo, 2015) .
FBOs are also catalyst of real community empowerment which is important
in sustaining the change that takes place in the community. Evidences have
shown us that deep community involvement is crucial as it provides the
necessary resources to keep the program sustainable over time (Nation
Online, 2013) .
References
Community Development Exchange. (2008, April). What
is Community Empowerment? (CDX, Ed.) Retrieved Octobe 18, 2018, from
www.cdx.org.uk:
https://myportal.upou.edu.ph/pluginfile.php/219578/mod_folder/content/0/what_is_community_empowerment.pdf?forcedownload=1
Lord, J., & Hutchinson, P. (1993, Spring). The
Process of Empowerment: Implications for Theory and Practice. (C. J.
Health, Ed.) Retrieved October 18, 2018, from Canadian Journal of Community
Mental Health:
https://myportal.upou.edu.ph/pluginfile.php/219578/mod_folder/content/0/Process%20of%20Empowerment.pdf?forcedownload=1
Mbuagbaw, L., & Shurik, E. (2011, October 26). Community
Particiaption in HIV and AIDS Program. (D. E. Barros, Ed.) Retrieved
October 18, 2018, from cde.intechopen.com:
http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/22456/InTech-Community_participation_in_hiv_aids_programs.pdf
Thompson, B., Viswanath, K., Molina, Y., Warnecke,
R., & Prelip, M. (2016, August 1). Strategies to Empower Communities
to Reduce Health Disparities.
doi:https://dx.doi.org/10.1377%2Fhlthaff.2015.1364
