The Soul Beat 223 - Maternal Health and Communication
In this issue of The Soul Beat:
- PROJECT EXPERIENCES on the use of television, sms, and mobile games for maternal health...
- RESEARCH AND REPORTS focusing on malaria in pregnancy and PMTCT...
- RESOURCES for youth and media action around maternal health...
This edition of The Soul Beat focuses on maternal health and contains a selection of programme experiences, research reports, and resources and guides that highlight how communication and media are helping to ensure safer pregnancies and healthy babies through education, social mobilisation, and advocacy.
If you would like your organisation's communication work or research and resource documents to be featured on the Soul Beat Africa website and in The Soul Beat newsletters, please contact soulbeat@comminit.com
To subscribe to The Soul Beat, click here or send an email to soulbeat@comminit.com with a subject of "subscribe".
1. Maternal Heath Channel - Ghana
1. Launched in February 2013, the Maternal Health Channel is a television and radio series that is part drama, part documentary, and part discussion, designed to improve maternal health in Ghana. Produced by Creative Storm Networks, the television series is airing once a week on two Ghanaian channels. The series follows the lives of women and their families across the country, from the relatively prosperous urban south to remote villages and the impoverished savannah region in the north. Each of the 30-minute episodes includes documentaries from a roving reporting crew, studio discussions filmed on set in Accra, news bulletins, and special reports.
2. Wazazi Nipendeni Safe Motherhood Campaign - Tanzania
Launched in November 2012, the Wazazi Nipendeni (Love Me, Parents) Safe Motherhood Campaign seeks to empower pregnant women and their partners to take steps to achieve a healthy pregnancy and safe delivery. Through a mix of mass media, community, and interpersonal communication channels, the campaign promotes key behaviours needed to work towards the Campaign on Accelerated Reduction of Maternal Mortality in Africa (CARMMA), an African-Union initiated programme working towards safer motherhood. Wazazi Nipendeni is led by the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare Reproductive and Child Health Section, in collaboration with a wide range of partners, and was developed by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communication Programs (JHUCCP).
3. Tanzania Capacity and Communication Project (TCCP) - Tanzania
Running from 2010 - 2015, the Tanzania Capacity and Communication Project (TCCP) is using social and behaviour change communication to encourage individual changes in the areas of HIV prevention, reproductive health, and maternal and child health, with the overall goal of leading to healthier families and communities. Centred around two key campaigns, Tuko wangapi? Tulizana and Jiamini!, TCCP uses radio, television, and print media, supported by SMS communication, to encourage awareness and dialogue. TCCP is led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communication Programs (JHUCCP), working in partnership with the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare – National AIDS Control Program and other partners.
4. MamaYe Campaign - Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Ethiopia
MamaYe is a campaign designed to change the expectations of Africans in six countries in relation to pregnancy and childbirth – away from fatalism and towards hope and survival. The campaign is working to improve maternal and newborn survival by sharing evidence, undertaking advocacy, and holding those responsible for maternal survival to account. MamaYe will also showcase solutions and success - and promote individuals and organisations that have worked selflessly to save the lives of mothers and babies. MamaYe is initiated of Evidence for Action, a multi-year programme to improve maternal and newborn survival in sub-Saharan Africa.
5. Get Them to 5 Alive! - Kenya
Launched in September 2012 and running until 2015, the Get Them to 5 Alive! campaign is working to raise awareness of the scale of child mortality and the leading causes of child deaths in Kenya, namely neonatal causes, diarrhoea, pneumonia, and malaria. It also seeks to educate on the basic interventions to help reduce under-five deaths from preventable causes and illnesses. The communication campaign is intended to serve as an umbrella messaging platform on child and maternal health in the country, and includes programme work, policy, and advocacy, as well as public awareness activities to raise awareness on child and maternal mortality in Kenya. The campaign is being initiated by Save the Children in partnership with World Vision Kenya and the Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation.
6. Campaign on Accelerated Reduction of Maternal Mortality in Africa (CARMMA) - Africa
Launched in May 2009, the Campaign on Accelerated Reduction of Maternal Mortality in Africa (CARMMA) is working to address the challenges of maternal mortality in African countries. Led by the African Union Commission, the campaign is anchored on three main priorities - positive messaging, sharing good practices and lessons learned, and intensifying the programme and communication activities aimed at reducing maternal, newborn and child mortality in Africa. As part of awareness raising, the campaign provides tools, such as video documentaries, to people championing the cause.
7. Half the Sky Movement - Mobile Games - India and East Africa
In September 2012, the Half the Sky Movement, a global multi-media, multi-partner initiative addressing gender empowerment, launched three hand-held mobile games for India and East Africa on topics such as maternal health, child health, and girls' education and empowerment. The games - Family Choices, 9-Minutes, and Worm Attack! - are designed to educate women and girls about essential health issues, increase awareness about gender equality, and empower them to bring about social change in these areas. The game "9-Minutes" simulates the experience of nine months of pregnancy in nine minutes and presents players with a series of physical, medical, and social choices in a race against the clock.
8. Technology for Maternal Health Project - Ghana
Launched in 2012, the Technology for Maternal Health Project in Ghana sends SMS messages with health information to the mobile phones of pregnant women. Launched by the Northern Regional Library, in partnership with the local development agency Savana Signatures, the project also includes the development of the library’s health corner and training of health workers to use computers to conduct research.
NEW SOUL BEAT AFRICA THEME SITE ON SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND RIGHTS!
This theme site forms part of a southern African focused initiative on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR), which is supported by Soul City Health and Development Institute and funded by the Sweden and Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad). The site currently contains over 230 knowledge summaries (project information, research reports, resources materials, etc.) related all areas of SRHR from across Africa.
For more information and to view this new site, click here.
STRATEGIC THINKING - RESEARCH REPORTS
9. Exploring Maternal and Child Health in South Sudan [August, 2012]
This summary shares findings of research to inform a series of radio programmes designed to improve Reproductive, Maternal, Neonatal, and Child Health (RMNCH) in South Sudan. The project is working to encourage changes in knowledge, attitudes, norms, self-efficacy, and societal support around key health issues prioritised by government and civil society as critical for saving the lives of women, newborn babies, and children. Led by BBC Media Action, the project will produce radio programming, coupled with community outreach work and training for local language partner stations and non-governmental/government partners. The research found that in many cases, women had knowledge and awareness of healthy practices but did not always fully understand what was beneficial about these practices.
10. ProVIC Champion Communities: Preventing Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV in the Democratic Republic of Congo
By Katie Saul
This case study discusses the experience of the Integrated HIV/AIDS Project (ProVIC) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in using a Champion Community approach to rebuild communities by helping them to reorganise, identify their assets, and capitalise on the population's determination to reduce the incidence of HIV and mitigate its impact on people living with HIV and their families. ProVIC is also working to build the capacity of community health workers and health care professionals as a driving force for improving PMTCT activities in the DRC. Through annual action plans, the communities lead HIV prevention, care, and support activities and become "Champions" upon reaching their targets and goals.
11. Peer Education: The Effects on Knowledge of Pregnancy Related Malaria and Preventive Practices in Women of Reproductive Age in Edo State, Nigeria [August, 2011]
By Petra F Mens, Pauline FD Scheelbeek and Hind Al Atabbi
This study, published by the BMC Public Health journal, explored peer-to-peer education as a tool in raising knowledge of malaria in pregnancy (MIP) among women of child bearing age. According to the article, there is limited uptake of measures to prevent malaria by pregnant women in Nigeria, which often relates to lack of knowledge. In the study, 1105 women of childbearing age were interviewed in their households using a structured questionnaire about their knowledge of malaria in general, MIP, and use of preventive measures. A peer education campaign was then launched to raise the level of knowledge in the community. According to the article, the peer education campaign had a significant impact in raising the level of knowledge among the women.
12. Improving Reproductive, Maternal and Newborn Health: Reducing Unintended Pregnancies [December, 2010]
By Jo Mulligan, Petra Nahmias, Katie Chapman, Anna Patterson, Michelle Burns, Matthew Harvey, Wendy Graham and Ian Askew
This paper from the United Kingdom (UK) Department for International Development (DFID) represents the fourth in a series of reviews summarising the current state of evidence on what works to improve reproductive, maternal, and newborn health (RMNH). It provides a summary of the evidence on reducing the burden of unintended pregnancies in terms of two main packages of care: family planning and safe abortion. For each of these packages, the scope and magnitude of benefits to women and to broader society are reviewed, and the component interventions and delivery modalities are outlined. The main body of the paper then synthesises the evidence on interventions to reduce barriers to the supply of and demand for these services, including estimates of cost-effectiveness.
13. Successes and Challenges for Malaria in Pregnancy Programming: A Three-Country Analysis [January, 2011]
This brief provides ministries of health (MOHs), donors, and malaria and reproductive health implementing partners with a synthesis of lessons learned in malaria in pregnancy (MIP) programming in three relatively high-performing countries - Malawi, Senegal, and Zambia. According to the publication, although many countries have made important strides toward their broader malaria goals, most are still far from achieving the 2010 Roll Back Malaria (RBM) Initiative and President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) targets for intermittent preventive treatment in pregnancy (IPTp) and insecticide-treated bed net (ITN) coverage among pregnant women. As countries continue scale-up of MIP interventions, they might benefit from specific tools that help to identify and overcome programmatic bottlenecks. This brief highlights best practices and successful strategies that can be applied to other malaria-endemic countries throughout Africa.
RATE AND REVIEW OUR CONTENT!
We would love to get your feedback on some of the knowledge shared in this newsletter. Please use the star rating system (see top of page) and comments form at the bottom of each content page. Your feedback will be greatly appreciated and will help us to better support your work.
You can also send any general comments to soulbeat@comminit.com
Please also share our content by voting "Like" on any of the pages visited or by sharing the page on Twitter.
14. A Reporter's Guide to Maternal Health [May, 2013]
This reporter's guide, published by Solutions Journalism Network and the Pulitzer Center, introduces journalists to potential solutions-oriented angles to maternal health stories. The Solutions Journalism Network works to support and legitimise the practice of solutions journalism: "rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems". They seek to help reporters examine not just what's wrong, but also to provide examples of innovators working toward solutions – focusing not just on what may be working (based on available evidence), but how and why it appears to be working, and alternatively, in what ways it may be falling short.
15. Youth Guide to Action on Maternal Health [2010]
Published by Women Deliver, the Youth Guide to Action on Maternal Health is designed to assist young people in their advocacy and awareness-raising efforts. The goal of this guide is to empower and equip young people with the tools, resources, and knowledge to use and develop messages, projects, and campaigns to increase awareness about young people and maternal health issues. The guide focuses on new media and technology based on a belief in the power of technology to empower youth to become leaders.
16. Safia, The Consequences of Early Pregnancy - Comic Book - Côte d'Ivoire
United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Côte d'Ivoire have produced this comic strip that tells the story of Safia, who married at the age of 16 and whose childbirth-related complications resulted in a fistula. The story follows her as she is rejected by her husband and the people in her village, until they are made aware of the cause of the problem and she gets assistance to correct the fistula. Using images and simple text, the comic is designed to raise awareness about fistula and the help that is available, as well as dispel myths about what it is.
STAY CONNECTED WITH SOUL BEAT AFRICA
Follow us on Twitter – @SoulBeatAfrica
Visit us on Facebook
Subscribe to our e-newsletters
Subscribe to our RSS feed
THE SOUL BEAT ARCHIVES
For previous Maternal Health related Soul Beat e-newsletters, see:
The Soul Beat 173 - Communicating for Safe Motherhood
The Soul Beat 130 - Promoting Family Planning
To view all past editions of The Soul Beat e-newsletter, click here.
Please send material for The Soul Beat to soulbeat@comminit.com
We would love to hear from you: Please send us your comments by clicking here or email soulbeat@comminit.com
To subscribe, click here.
To unsubscribe, reply to this message with "unsubscribe" as the subject.
To find out more about Soul Beat Africa, click here.
- Log in to post comments