"There has been exponential growth in the numbers of ‘digital development’ programmes seeking to leverage technology to solve systemic challenges. However, despite promising results and a shift from pilots to scale-ups, many have failed to realise their full potential. This paper reflects on les
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sons learnt from scaling and transitioning one of the largest mobile health programmes in the world to the Indian government. The complementary suite of services was designed by BBC Media Action to strengthen families’ reproductive, maternal, neonatal and child health behaviours. Mobile Academy was a training course to refresh frontline health workers’ (FLHWs) knowledge and improve their interpersonal communication skills. Mobile Kunji was a job aid to support FLHWs’ interactions with families. Kilkari delivered weekly audio information to families’ phones to reinforce FLHWs’ counselling. As of April 2019, when Mobile Academy and Kilkari were transitioned to the government, 206 000 FLHWs had graduated and Kilkari had reached 10 million subscribers. Lessons learnt include the following: (1) private sector business models are challenging in low-resource settings; (2) you may pilot ‘apples’ but scale ‘oranges’; (3) trade-offs are required between ideal solution design and affordability; (4) programme components should be reassessed before scaling; (5) operational viability at scale is a prerequisite for sustainability; (6) consider the true cost of open-source software; (7) taking informed consent in low-resource settings is challenging; (8) big data offer promise, but social norms and SIM change constrain use; (9) successful government engagements require significant capacity; (10) define governance structures and roadmaps up front." (Abstract)
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"COVID-19 created a substantial set of challenges for health communication practitioners in the process of planning, implementing, and evaluating entertainment-education (EE) campaigns. EE is a theory and evidence-based communication strategy that employs entertainment media for educational messagin
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g. Here, we briefly review EE campaigns in response to previous health emergencies and present three cases of EE responses to the COVID-19 pandemic from leading global organizations (PCI Media, BBC Media Action, and Sesame Workshop). Responses ranged from adaptation and re-distribution of existing content to creating new content under social-distancing restrictions and utilizing transmedia. These cases demonstrate that EE initiatives responding to future pandemics may be well served by starting with existing infrastructure to quickly build capacity, support, and trust; working with partners to tailor programs to the local context; and continuing to focus on good storytelling while simultaneously considering evolving media formats and theory." (Abstract)
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"There is a growing body of evidence from rigorous evaluations demonstrating the effectiveness of education entertainment – ‘edutainment’– interventions in achieving development outcomes. Building on this research, this study presents the results of a pioneering quasi-experimental evaluation
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of Navrangi Re, a 26-episode television drama aired in India in 2019. The show was the first ever edutainment broadcast on commercial television in India. It aimed to influence sanitation behaviours through changing knowledge and attitudes, increasing risk perception, stimulating conversations, building collective efficacy, and creating social disapproval against poor faecal sludge management practices. The evaluation compared changes in outcomes of those exposed to the TV show with those unexposed, applying differences-in-differences estimation to a panel of 2,959 respondents. Baseline balance tests show high comparability between exposed and unexposed respondents. It found exposure to the drama led to significant changes in most outcomes with 37% of those who watched at least one episode showing behavioural intent to act, rising to 78% of those who had watched at least seven episodes. The show reached 59.6 million unique viewers, confirming drama as an effective, low cost and scalable tool to engage people around faecal sludge management – a critical and hard to address issue." (Abstract)
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"This book lays out the history of entertainment-education and discusses the boundaries of what counts as entertainment-education and narrative persuasion, includes both authors who work within academia and authors who are practitioners, and chapters focusing on developed and developing countries; d
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raws upon communication principles and theory but prioritizes actionable lessons for how entertainment-education actually works." (Publisher description)
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