The success of MDA programs requires effective planning, community engagement, and delivery by community drug distributors. This proposal seeks to assess barriers and facilitators of effective coverage. Using in depth interviews, focus group discussions, and surveys, they will investigate factors related to acceptance, availability, and accessibility of MDA from the perspectives of drug distributors, healthcare workers, community leaders, the NTD program, and community members. Using the findings from the formative phase, an intervention package will be developed and implemented during MDA, followed by an evaluation of the impact of the intervention on coverage.

This project is part of a larger series of four studies that use a mixed methods approach to understand why particular districts that have undergone 5+ years of MDA are failing or are likely to fail transmission assessment surveys (TAS). Other studies include 169.1D Ghana, 169.2U Burkina Faso, and 177U Nepal. This study in Uttar Pradesh also provides a second opportunity to deploy the rapid ethnographic approach that will be first tested in Nepal. Team members from HERD Nepal will be traveling to India to train their team on the technique and assist with roll out.