GASPRO International Journal of Eminent Scholars

ABSTRACT Sustainable social and behavior change requires collaboration at multiple levels, as partnerships yield stronger impacts than isolated efforts. Social mobilization is a process to engage a wide range of traditional, community, civil society and opinion leaders around a common cause or issue. Expanding beyond community engagement as a focus, social mobilization reaches out to non-governmental organisations, professional groups/networks, youth groups, women’s groups, community-based organisations, faith-based organisations, professional networks and the private sector to catalyse these different groups to take action and/or support change a common cause (e.g. immunization or Vitamin A supplementation; back to school campaigns etc.). Through alliance-building and partnerships often combined with media campaigns, social mobilization also engages and motivates various partners at national and local levels to raise awareness of and demand for a particular development objective and to provide sustainable, multi-faceted solutions to broad social problems. Therefore, strategies of social mobilization and community engagement include using advocacy to mobilize resources, media and leaders to raise awareness, create public spheres for debate and build partnerships. This study hereby seeks to investigate social mobilization as a strategy to health education campaign and programmes. KEYWORDS: Social mobilization, community mobilization, health education campaign/ programmes