The intervention’s engagement of community members as change agents (i.e. community activists) appeared particularly impactful, because the ideas were emerging from trusted and known friends and neighbours rather than people from outside the community. The qualitative data indicates that CAs’ influence stemmed from the multiple roles they embodied within the community’s social network as community member (“one of us”), opinion leader and change agent. In our broader qualitative evaluation  we found CAs viewed their role as a vocation irrespective of formal programme support. It was a means through which they gained a valued identity, particularly for those who had not completed their formal education or achieved anything of note in their community. These findings are in agreement with diffusion theory and studies that found identifying opinion leaders and using them as change agents can increase diffusion of health promotion interventions at the community level [20, 41, 44]. However, similar to our findings, others have found the identification of actual opinion leaders was essential to their effectiveness . Valente and Pumpuang studied methods for identifying opinion leaders and found programs using multiple methods such as expert identification and peer nominations were most likely to secure successful opinion leaders for promoting behaviour change [20, 41, 44].