Diagnóstico de saúde em uma comunidade rural africana no âmbito de um programa de cooperação internacional: adaptações e aplicabilidade do método da estimativa rápida

Abstract

To accomplish a health intervention in order to improve a community quality of life, it is necessary, first, to do a diagnosis of its health situation. The use of participatory tools helps in a diagnosis that reflects the perspective of the individual inserted in the community, leading to more effective intervention proposals and contributing to the sustainability of the activities. The Rapid Appraisal method is a participatory tool that leads to a situational diagnosis in health relatively quickly and at a low cost. It rests on three pillars for data collection: interviews with key informants, observation of the territory, and existing information, previously collected. These data are compared in a triangulation process that allows the extraction of the health status of the evaluated population. This study examines the application of the Rapid Appraisal method for the situational diagnosis of health in an African rural community and points out actions that will enable an improvement in the population's quality of life. It is based on a much larger international cooperation project called Cotton-Solos, which has as its main focus the improvement of soil conditions for cotton planting to increase productivity. Data were produced through semi-structured interviews with three members of the community, a walk to observe the territory by two researchers accompanied by local residents, analysis of documents presented by the population and a structured questionnaire. As a result, it was shown that the Rapid Appraisal method was able to list, in a generic way, several health problems in the community that resulted in proposals and implementation of actions to improve the health of this population. The importance of parasitic diseases, especially malaria, as a factor of morbidity and mortality and the need for improvements in infrastructure and basic sanitation was observed. For the execution of actions, there is a need to explore the problems presented with an individual and family approach.