Randomisation and assignment of intervention
Peer navigators and other key stakeholders were invited to a public randomisation ceremony. The public ceremony ensured transparency and fairness in the randomisation and increased buy-in and engagement of the community. A random subset of 10,000 acceptable allocations was taken from those previously generated to use for the ceremony. Each allocation was given a unique running number, 1 through 10,000. Four sacks containing 10 balls each, numbered 0–9 was prepared. For each cluster, the peer navigators chose their own leader to represent their cluster. First, each leader was asked to draw a piece of paper from a box. All the papers were blank except for four. Next, the four leaders with the non-blank papers were each invited to draw a ball from one of the four sacks. The 4-digit number that was generated by this process corresponded to the allocation running number (with 0000 representing 10,000).