Significance of a social mobilization intervention for engaging communities in polio vaccination campaigns: Evidence from CORE Group Polio Project, Uttar Pradesh, India

BACKGROUND: Globally, community engagement is an integral part of most public health programs and the social mobilization (SM) intervention of India’s polio eradication program is one such example that contributed to eliminating polio from the country. CORE Group Polio Project (CGPP), a partner of Uttar Pradesh (U.P.) SM Network executed its activities through a network of social mobilizers called Community Mobilization Coordinators (CMCs). These were deployed in polio high risk areas to perform awareness generation and trust-building activities with communities and achieved high coverage of polio vaccination during Supplementary Immunization Activity campaigns (SIAs). This paper measures the extent and outcomes of CMC community engagement in SM interventions and polio SIAs. METHODS: This study used secondary, cluster-level data from Management Information System of CGPP India, including 52 SIAs held between January 2008 to September 2017 in 56 blocks/polio planning units, covering 12 districts of U.P. We used five indicators that reflected community engagement in polio SIAs and constructed a Community Engagement Index (CEI). Further, we estimated the difference in the CEI between CMC and non-CMC areas, using Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) and also estimated treatment effects through Difference-in-Differences (DID) method using STATA. RESULTS: Overall, 78.6% (95% confidence interval (CI) = 78.3, 78.8) of families from the study area were engaged in the polio SIAs and the extent of community engagement increased over time. The mean CEI of entire study period in CMC areas (85.8%; 95% CI = 85.6, 86.0) was significantly higher (P < 0.001) than that of non-CMC areas (71.3%; 95% CI = 71.1, 71.5). Over time, the SM intervention led to at least 11 percentage points increase in the CEI of CMC areas with about 17% of this achievement attributable to CGPP India’s SM efforts. CONCLUSIONS: The study findings suggest that intensive social mobilization efforts can significantly increase the extent of community engagement. The community engagement learnings of polio SM Network may be useful to achieve the desired outcomes of public health programs such as the National Health Mission (NHM) of India, that serves communities for multiple health issues.