"Through a careful review of the evidence, this briefing offers a spirited case for why donors, practitioners and developing country governments need to pay more attention to the role of communication in tackling global health. The briefing finds that: Communication has been central to public health
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developments from Ebola to polio and from HIV to child survival. While health policy officials recognise the importance of health communication, it often remains poorly funded, under-utilised and badly planned in public health programmes. Even when it does prioritise communication, public health programming often fails to reflect best practice around the role of social and behaviour change communications (SBCC). Progress has been stymied by the complexity of social and behaviour change communication, debates around “what counts” as evidence, and the learning and capacity-strengthening gaps within the health communication field. Donors should ensure that their staff are familiar with the health communication evidence base and lessons learned from past programmes, so that they are equipped to plan and evaluate proposals for new communication interventions effectively." (BBC Media Action website)
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"Argues that media — whether traditional or online — matters a great deal in the lives of girls in the developing world. It matters because it has the ability to be harmful to girls’ interests and selfesteem, and it matters because it can also be so effective in playing a positive role in girl
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s’ lives. Specifically, media can influence girls’ aspirations and behaviours around their health and livelihoods, open the door to greater participation in society and ensure that girls’ issues move higher up the public agenda. If challenges around media access and control are addressed head on and girls come to be valued as an audience, then media can play a vital role in helping to advance the well-being of adolescent girls in regions of the world where their interests have traditionally been most neglected." (Introduction)
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"By assessing edutainment as a space of cultural translation, Drama for Development advances an often neglected perspective in this topics' research. It focuses on what happens when various goals, worldviews and needs from donors, producers and the audiences come together in the production and meani
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ng construction of soap operas. The perspective is illustrated by examples from the largely South Asian experiences of the BBC World Service Trust, itself seen as a cross-cultural contact zone. Tensions between western scientific paradigm and local researcher in the audience research process (chapter 3), the cosmopolitan competencies of the production team in harmonizing the urge for authenticity, cultural sensitivity and development objectives (chapter 6) and the construction of social realism as an interplay of the observed realities of the audiences and the neo-liberal themes of donors (e.g., opium in ch.6 and forced marriage in chapter 11) exemplify some of the processes taking place in that zone. The epistemological position of the book is complementary to the more technical perspective of the existing body of literature, which sometimes fails to capture the complex processes of meaning construction and link it to the wider social context." (commbox)
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