The INFO Project Blog

The INFO Project is headquartered in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, within the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communication Programs (CCP). Along with a mouthful of a name, our location within CCP makes us privvy to the latest news about highly effective health communication activities around the world. Recently, we learned about some comprehensive health analysis being dispatched in Pakistan’s English-language International News.

Working as Deputy Team Leader with the CCP Pakistan team, Dr. Zaeem ul Haq’s current professional focus is maternal and newborn health. He also advises the National Programme of Family Planning and Primary Health Care in 132 districts around the country, and is designing a mass media campaign with this program.

In his spare time–one wonders how there is any–Dr. ul Haq has been writing a series of editorials that connect behavior change communication (BCC) theory and maternal and child health with issues like global warming, famine and HIV. In a March appeal for  improving the country’s health facilities and training of birth attendants (Lights, camera, action: for a cause), he writes,

Today, Pakistani mothers and infants are facing a situation worse than the Ethiopian famine [of the mid 1980s]. A mother dies every 20 minutes while in pregnancy or while giving birth to her child in Pakistan. Similarly, a child less than a year dies every two or three minutes in the country. This is a ’story’ much bigger than the African famine, because it has been happening for decades as opposed to the famine that spanned a few years only.

In an April editorial, Dr. ul Haq highlights Pakistan’s acute vulnerability to environmental problems, writing that that “infective diarrhea and dysentary [will] likely increase further as a result of… climate change.” Already one of the three most common diseases among children aged less than five, diarrhea’s impact on children in this region could worsen with growing temperatures, water stagnation, especially in light of poor existing santitation and waste disposal. But instead of pointing fingers, the health communication specialist has a simple, relatable suggestion for policymarkers: he writes that the “small step of promoting exclusive breast-feeding can go a long way.” Read the rest of this entry »

INFO is gearing up to launch a new kind of social networking site. The Elements of Successful Family Planning Programs is more than your new bicycle. It’s your fast-tracked guide to meeting colleagues around the world, finding new evidence-based resources, and gaining insight from FP program authorities around the world who have built successful programs. Join today, and stay tuned for the site to launch next week!

Vermont-based Population Media Center (PMC), run by Education-Entertainment pioneer Bill Ryerson, has just launched a new Web site with blogging and loads of multimedia. PMC’s programs are featured in INFO’s new report on Communication for Better Health, as well as this one on Entertainment-Education, and have been highlighted on the BBC Health Check program as well.

Below is a video of PMC’s work with UNFPA in Nigeria. Tune in to view Behavior Change Communication-oriented soap operas from some of the 15 countries PMC has worked in, including India, Ethiopia, and Jamaica.

In his editorial in the latest issue of The Pop Reporter, Arvind Singhal, the Samuel Shirley and Edna Holt Marston Endowed Professor at the University of Texas El Paso, challenges behavior change scholars and practitioners to change their way of thinking about how behavior change actually occurs.

The purpose of this editorial is to provoke scholars and practitioners engaged in social change, including those involved in health promotion and education, to think differently about how (behavior) change happens… This problematic prevailing mind-set of behavior change stated as “if we do this to individuals, they will behave in this way”–is a result of the overwhelming dominance of cause-effect Newtonian thinking that spilled over to social science and was reified over decades without much questioning.

He suggests that many of us are wedded to thinking about complex health problems and behavior change goals in linear, individualistic, cognitive-processing frameworks rather than in ways in which outcomes can be thought of as dynamic and emergent, and where serendipity, self organizing and surprise is valued.

What do you think? If his arguments are true, what changes would need to be made to Behavior Change Communication programming based on them?

SING MUSIC VIDEO

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On World AIDS Day, December 1, 2007, a charity record titled “Sing” was released globally to raise money and awareness for the activist HIV/AIDS organization, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). The organization campaigns for treatment for people with HIV and to reduce new HIV infections.

Singer Annie Lennox teamed up with 22 other female superstar singers to record a song that Lennox had written, “Sing.” Some of the other singers include Madonna, Celine Dion, Pink, Shakira, Dido, Faith Hill, Joss Stone, and Melissa Etheridge. The “Sing Campaign” also encourages people to get involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS by, for example, donating directly to TAC, organizing events to raise money for TAC, hosting the “Sing” banner on other Web sites, raising awareness about the Sing Campaign and HIV/AIDS by word-of-mouth, and educating children in schools about HIV/AIDS. Watch the “Sing” music video on “MySpaceTV Videos.”

As one of the authors of the recently published Population Reports issue on behavior change communication programs (“Communication for Better Health”), this campaign caught my eye for a number of different reasons. First and foremost, the campaign design of using popular music by well-known singers gives the campaign great potential for success. Read the rest of this entry »