Community health clubs growth monitoring: experience from Zimbabwe’s Small Towns WASH Programme

The Government of Zimbabwe and UNICEF are implementing a Small Towns WASH Programme in 14 small urban towns of Zimbabwe. Hygiene Promotion is one of the key programme components and activities are being delivered through community, school and market health clubs. An adaptation of a tool, known as the Group Maturity Index for tracking the development and growth of the health clubs by measuring progress of the clubs across five domains of objectives, governance, systems, resourcing and impact has been developed; two assessments of clubs have been done in October 2015 and May 2016 respectively. This paper compares the results of the two assessments and looks at the usefulness of the tool for programming. It provides a basis for development workers to adapt and obtain an objective means of tracking areas of weakness and strengths when working with health clubs and community based groups.