Guiding Principles

Strengths Based Approach

A strength-based approach shifts away from focusing on perceived problems and deficits and instead highlights and leverages strengths, existing assets, and aspirations. In this approach, communities are seen as being full of resources. Through this, individuals are encouraged to identify and foster enabling social environments and health care providers are encouraged to collaborate with their clients and the communities they serve. Guiding principles of this approach include:

• Recognizing individuals as having many strengths and the capacity to continue to learn, grow and change.

• Basing interventions on self-determination.

• Commitment to fostering the power of individuals and/or groups to act on their own behalf and to achieve a greater measure of control in shaping their lives and future.

• Framing problems as the result of interactions between individuals, organizations, or structures rather than deficits within individuals, organizations, or structures.

Trauma Informed and Aware

A strength-based lens also requires a deliberate shift from “What is wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” The people of South Sudan have endured decades of violence and displacement due to a protracted Civil War with Sudan and conflict between South Sudanese ethnic groups. In a survey across six states, 40% of respondents showed symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder^[1]. Trauma impacts health seeking behavior and provider trust.

Trauma-informed care increases the agency of communities and individuals in decisions about their health care, increasing trust with providers and decreasing provider burnout. The design and development of SBC tools and processes will apply these principles:

• Safety - feeling physically and psychologically safe.

• Trustworthiness and transparency - operations and decisions are made with transparency to promote trust among all parties.

• Peer support - provision of support when someone has experienced an instance of harassment, abuse, or trauma.

• Collaboration and mutuality - establishing accountability measures so that power dynamics are openly acknowledged.

• Empowerment of voice and choice - placing the safety and consent at the center of any decision involving them (taking power away from someone who is experiencing abuse/harassment can make healing very difficult).

• Cultural, historical, and gender - incorporates policies, protocols, and processes that acknowledge the ethnic and cultural needs.

Gender and Power

Breakthrough ACTION South Sudan systematically integrated gender across their work. including each health area in addition to research, monitoring and evaluation (RME) activities, and project operations by:

• Applying SBC methodologies that address intractable or challenging gender-related attitudes, norms, and behaviors that lead to sustainable change in health outcomes.

• Expanding the integration of SBC approaches in service delivery programs that address gender-related factors.

• Strengthening capacity of country partners (e.g., governments, non-governmental organizations [NGOs], and community-based organizations [CBOs]) to design, implement, and evaluate gender transformative approaches using SBC.

Conflict Transformation

Justice and fairness are key factors to effective engagement in a fragile context^[2]. In South Sudan, societal norms are challenged by a changing environment, including migration and ethnic conflict. Partners working in South Sudan should aim to strengthen opportunities for consensus by adopting a conflict transformation lens. This relationship-centric approach will increase opportunities for inclusion of groups traditionally underrepresented in community decision-making processes, such as ethnic minorities, women, and young people. This approach requires intentional effort that:

• Acknowledges underlying conditions giving rise to intergroup conflict.

• Seeks creative solutions aimed at addressing what is happening in human relationships at a deeper level.

• Envisions a framework that holds these together and creates a platform to address the content, the context, and the structure of relationships.