Reviewer’s report
Title: 
Exploring the impact of a community participatory intervention on
women's capability: A qualitative study in Gulu Northern Uganda
Version: 
0 
Date: 
22 Jun 2020
Reviewer's report:
This paper is looking at the impact of women's participation in PLA groups in
Gulu, Northern Uganda through a qualitative analysis of data. It draws on Sen's
capability framework to understand how the groups worked. I really appreciated
that there were both positive impacts described, and also reflection on how
things did not change for women (and why) - the balance is important. 
Broadly, I think there are some interesting ideas in this paper, but I think it
requires significant work to make it suitable for publication. 
I have three main issues.
First, I struggled to fully understand what the intervention was. The actual
intervention delivered was described on page 6 in about 7 lines. It would be great
to get a bit more information about it (including its name), how long it was
developed over, what its main objectives were, the amount of training and
support that facilitators were provided with, how many sessions etc. Later on we
realise that men were involved in 
couple of sessions as well, so that needs to be
included here.
Second, the quotes while interesting were provided as a list. I find it is much
clearer to have text in between to help tell the story of what the authors are trying
to convey. At the moment it is hard to read. I also struggled with the fact that
there was not enough guidance on how the intervention supported women to
change their lives. Some of this can be around how the intervention supported
women to realise they could act to take charge of their health. However, for the
section on violence against women, it was unclear how they intervention worked
to support violence reduction, as many of the quotes are just that things have
changed. It would be great to understand more clearly the pathways through
which this occurred.
Third, in the introduction it was quite long and took a while to get really clear as
to where the paper was heading. It may be better to focus on previous research
that has looked qualitatively about how PLA groups operate to support change
(and their challenges) rather than go into great detail about the quantitative
studies. It may also be worth going into greater detail about Sen's capabilities
framework as I struggled to connect it all together. 
A bigger question I had, is whether the authors felt the intervention had
supported women to take charge of health on their own and also address wider
constraints? Building a bridge seems pretty forward thinking and really
transforming contexts, and moving away from new born and child health - so
these groups did something bigger.
Also, the important role that the PLA groups were embedded in savings groups -
again, was this really important - the quotes suggest so. 
Minor
Dates for data collection? And Also when the intervention was run? And the
timelines so we understand whether this was during or after the intervention?
Second paragraph on page 3: "Women's group based on the PLA approach…" I
think it needs to be clear that these are women's groups targeting newborn and
child mortality
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Yes
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authors.
Yes
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Yes
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Not relevant to this manuscript
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Needs some language corrections before being published
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