With an aim to help the rural communities to be better prepared and equipped through prioritised community-led initiatives and participation, the Nagaland State Rural Livelihoods (NSRLM) in solidarity with the State Rural Livelihoods Missions under DAY-NRLM across the country have been fostering rural community participation from 1245 villages across Nagaland in combating the spread of the virus through strong Self-Help Group (SHG) network by facilitating large-scale COVID-19 “behavioral change” measures.
According to NSRLM, the rural community comprises over 70% of the state’s total population. In the face of the pandemic, rural community is rendered most vulnerable due to lack of COVID-19 awareness, unpreparedness to pandemics, under nutrition, weak public health infrastructure and services.
In this regard, failure to empower the rural communities could pose considerable risk which may be uncontainable, which is why an empowered community is the key to public health and is central in the fight against epidemics and pandemics.
The state mission have built on and scaled the efforts of community participation towards preparedness, response and resilience to the second wave of the pandemic through creating awareness on COVID-19 vaccine awareness, appropriate behaviour, health seeking behaviour, and immunity building measures to over 10290 rural households.
Towards collective efforts, convergence approach involving RD department, health & family welfare department, and social welfare department has also been actively engaging the SHGs, ASHA workers and Anganwadi workers towards formation of village surveillance team (VST).
According to NSRLM, this effort is further strengthened through conscious capacity building and training of other key community stakeholders such as church leaders, village council members, student bodies and other CBOs. 648 VST have been instituted till date.
To ensure universal coverage for COVID-19 vaccination in Nagaland, NSRLM has been training its community cadres, church leaders and teachers on “management of mild COVID-19 symptoms at home”. Relevant IEC materials (print and audio-visual) have been customised by NSRLM and further translated into local dialects by the community cadres for wider dissemination at household level.
Further, NSRLM informed that the focus on putting the rural community participation and involvement at the centre of COVID-19 control strategy could play a key role in planning village-level rapid actions towards effective control and mitigation of the virus spread in collaboration with concerned local bodies such as VCs, student bodies, Churches, and other CBOs.