Success Story: Media Development and Capacity Building in Action

The Ghana Communicate for Health Project ran from 2015-2019. As part of its efforts to address regional perspectives and needs, Communicate for Health conducted two collaborative workshops to discuss region-specific audience research and design creative materials that would address identified social and behavioral barriers and benefits in key health areas.

Both workshops engaged multiple private sector design partners, regional health promotion officers (RHPOs), technical focal persons for malaria and nutrition, representatives of local media houses, USAID implementing partners (IPs), and other regional stakeholders to produce GoodLife materials for their areas of the country.

Both workshops featured intensive SBCC capacity building experiences for participants while strengthening networks for sustainable regional collaboration.

In an evaluation of the workshop process and outcomes, participants gave the overall experience a score of 8.3 out of a possible 10 points, indicating a high level of learning and satisfaction. Some said the workshop was the first time they had the opportunity to work on each step of material development—from a creative brief to actual production. Many appreciated the opportunity to review audience research for their particular areas.

Source: Communicate for Health Ghana

Date of Publication: January 28, 2020

Community Dialogues for Child Health

This Learning Brief summarizes a qualitative process evaluation conducted to assess communities’ response to a community dialogue approach, after one year of implementation in rural settings of three countries (Mozamique, Uganda and Zambia), in terms of outreach, relevance and intermediate results.

The study finds that community dialogues can be a powerful approach to make health promotion activities of community-based volunteers more participatory and effective in addressing social norms around child care practices, particularly in setting new social norms for early care-seeking at community health worker point of care.

Source: Malaria Consortium

Date of Publication: March 25, 2019

Diva Centres Project, Zambia

A teens-only approach to contraception is getting girls the services they need to make the choices that are right for them.

In Zambia, a radical new approach to contraception is giving adolescent girls the information and services they need to make their own choices and take control of their futures. At the Diva Centres, girls do their nails while having informal conversations about boys and sex. They hang out with friends, learn about contraception in their own terms from trained peers, and, when they’re ready, receive counseling and access to a variety of short and long-term birth control methods in a safe and judgment-free environment from a trained professional. In this safe environment, girls begin to connect birth control with their future aspirations and get the information they need to make smart decisions from a safe and trusted resource.

By taking a human-centered approach, and spending weeks immersed in the lives and aspirations of Zambian teens, the team designed a multi-touchpoint approach to getting girls the contraception they need.

For girls who visited one of the three Diva Centres, 82% got contraceptive services and 36% returned for another visit.

Source: IDEO, Marie Stopes Zambia

Date of Publication: March 25, 2019