Assessment of Journalist Training in Family Planning and Reproductive Health
Chapel Hill, NC: Data for Impact; USAID (2022), 62 pp.
Contains 8 tables, 7 figures
"A total of 624 individuals were trained during the period 2014–2020 through Office of Population and Reproductive Health (PRH) funded training activities. About 46 percent of PRH-funded trainees were male, 52 percent female, and 2 percent unknown. About a third of these trainings were delivered in West Africa, a third in East Africa, and the rest in South Asia, Europe, the United States, the Caribbean and virtually [...] During the same period, the Demographic and Health Surveys Program (DHS) conducted 16 journalist trainings, each in a different low- or middle-income country (LMIC).
With PRB guidelines, facilitators created each Women’s Edition training around a family planning or reproductive or maternal health topic relevant to localities and interests. They explored technical information about contextualized themes in each training, along with facilitating skill-building activities on how to interpret and report on data. The baseline curriculum for the program covered topics such as why data matters, basic math for understanding data, sources of public-health data, the language of public health data, and using data to tell a story.
The Youth Multimedia Fellowship trainings focused on skills to build content and to create innovative digital campaigns using accessible technology such as mobile phones and social media platforms. Training content covered advocacy campaign strategy, multimedia product development, videomaking, social media use, and partnership/coalition building. Trainers taught these skills within the context of reproductive and maternal health themes such as youth-friendly family-planning services, female genital cutting, child marriage, gender-based violence, fistula prevention, and maternal health.
DHS journalist trainings familiarized participants with key findings from newly published country DHS results and provided content on how to read DHS tables to identify specific data points, patterns, and trends. Trainings also included instruction on basic math and statistics skills, as well as how to identify and draft a story idea based on DHS data.
Review of a variety of Population Reference Bureau (PRB) and DHS documents including, for example, workplans, training reports, and training evaluations; supplemented by other data sources, show positive outcomes in quantity and quality of reporting on FP/RH issues. Other elements of this assessment also suggest that all trainings were well organized, well delivered, and served an important purpose.
Social media analysis shows more tweets posted by training participants post training, compared to before they were trained. Several tweets became viral (retweeted more than 50k times).
The assessment has several limitations, most importantly a low response rate. The primary limitation of the desk review was inconsistency in comprehensiveness and type of documentation provided to the assessment team. However, respondents provided sufficient information to understand the scope and reach of the trainings." (Findings, pages 7-8)
With PRB guidelines, facilitators created each Women’s Edition training around a family planning or reproductive or maternal health topic relevant to localities and interests. They explored technical information about contextualized themes in each training, along with facilitating skill-building activities on how to interpret and report on data. The baseline curriculum for the program covered topics such as why data matters, basic math for understanding data, sources of public-health data, the language of public health data, and using data to tell a story.
The Youth Multimedia Fellowship trainings focused on skills to build content and to create innovative digital campaigns using accessible technology such as mobile phones and social media platforms. Training content covered advocacy campaign strategy, multimedia product development, videomaking, social media use, and partnership/coalition building. Trainers taught these skills within the context of reproductive and maternal health themes such as youth-friendly family-planning services, female genital cutting, child marriage, gender-based violence, fistula prevention, and maternal health.
DHS journalist trainings familiarized participants with key findings from newly published country DHS results and provided content on how to read DHS tables to identify specific data points, patterns, and trends. Trainings also included instruction on basic math and statistics skills, as well as how to identify and draft a story idea based on DHS data.
Review of a variety of Population Reference Bureau (PRB) and DHS documents including, for example, workplans, training reports, and training evaluations; supplemented by other data sources, show positive outcomes in quantity and quality of reporting on FP/RH issues. Other elements of this assessment also suggest that all trainings were well organized, well delivered, and served an important purpose.
Social media analysis shows more tweets posted by training participants post training, compared to before they were trained. Several tweets became viral (retweeted more than 50k times).
The assessment has several limitations, most importantly a low response rate. The primary limitation of the desk review was inconsistency in comprehensiveness and type of documentation provided to the assessment team. However, respondents provided sufficient information to understand the scope and reach of the trainings." (Findings, pages 7-8)
