Community empowerment for health promotion in slums areas: A narrative review with emphasis on challenges and interventions

Community empowerment has been proposed since the 1980s as a way to increase people’s power to influence social determinants of health. However, community empowerment for health promotion in urban slums still faces challenges. The present study examined interventions, challenges, actors, scopes, and the consequences mentioned in various studies and with emphasizing interventions and executive challenges tried to create a clear understanding of empowerment programs in slums and improving their health. Narrative review method was used to conduct the study. Databases including PubMed, Scopus, Embase, Web of Science, and Cochrane were searched. The selection of studies was done according to the “community empowerment” defined by the World Health Organization, the concept of bottom–up approach for health promotion of Laverack and Labonte’s study and definition of slums by UN-HABITAT. Finally, Hare and Noblit’s meta-synthesis was used to analyze the studies. From 15 selected studies, the most intervention proposed for empowerment was identified to be “residents’ participation in expressing problems and solutions.” The challenge of “creating a sense of trust and changing some attitudes among residents” was the greatest challenge in the studies. Moreover, “improving living conditions and health services” were the most important outcomes, “slum residents” and “governments” were the most important actors, and “sanitation” was the most important scope among the studies. Having a comprehensive view to the health and its determinants and attention to the factors beyond neighborhood and health sector would lead to fewer implementation challenges and better intervention choices to health promotion of slum dwellers.