What is an importance of social mobilization?

Social Mobilization, as defined by UNICEF, is a broad scale movement to engage people's participation in achieving a specific development goal through self-reliant efforts. It involves all relevant segments of society: decision and policy makers, opinion leaders, bureaucrats and technocrats, professional groups, religious associations, commerce and industry, communities and individuals. It is a planned decentralized process that seeks to facilitate change for development through a range of players engaged in interrelated and complementary efforts. It takes into account the felt needs of the people, embraces the critical principle of community involvement, and seeks to empower individuals and groups for action.

Mobilizing the necessary resources, disseminating information tailored to targeted audiences, generating intersectoral support and fostering cross-professional alliances are also part of the process. While the components of the process may be everyday practice in many development programs, they tend to be taken up in isolation of each other. Social mobilization in total aims at a continuum of activities in a broad strategic framework. The process encompasses dialogue and partnership with a wide spectrum of societal elements. At the policy level, the outcomes should be a supportive framework for decision making and resource allocation to empower communities to act at the grassroots level. The outcomes should be people's active involvement ranging from identifying a need to implementation in achieving the development objective and evaluation effort. The solidarity of bureaucrats and technocrats and a broad alliance of partners among various non-governmental groups are equally critical for the attainment of any change-oriented development goal. Simply stated, social mobilization calls for a journey among partners and results in the successful transformation of development goals into societal action.

Though circumstances differ from country to country and often from one part of a country to another, health programs depend upon the collaboration of other sectors. WHO has stressed the need to recognize the intersectoral nature of health, but little concrete action has been taken to effectuate such an approach. For a health program to succeed, the health sector needs not just a helping hand from others, but a genuine partnership whereby ownership of the programs is shared and the stakes of other sectors are clearly recognized. The societal mobilization strategy calls for partnership with all stake holders