Community Health Workers Compete to Develop Creative Slogans and Images to Improve Maternal and Newborn Health in Jharkhand, India
This post was originally published on Kate Mitchell’s blog, Maternal Mortality Daily. Reposted with permission.
On Wednesday, September 29th, nearly 300 community health workers from 174 villages in the rural Seraikela block of Jharkhand, India came together for an interesting event that involved plenty of art supplies, a flurry of creative ideas, a tangible passion for and dedication to improving rural maternal and newborn health, and a little bit of healthy competition.
The gathering, part of the Maternal and Newborn Survival Initiative (MANSI), was an effort to develop effective behavior change communication tools for four maternal health interventions being implemented through MANSI– by tapping into the vast knowledge, experiences, and creative capacity of the newly identified community health workers.
Holding the belief that there is no better source of ideas for effective slogans and images than the community itself, MANSI staff coordinated a contest that called on community health workers to develop slogans and images to explain the importance of the MANSI health interventions. The thinking behind the contest was that if the artistic representations of the health interventions and the key messages come from within the communities, then the images and messages will be more likely to resonate with the community members—and ultimately the health practices will be more likely to be widely understood and adopted.
Before the contest began, the MANSI team provided an overview of the four maternal health interventions that the health workers would be developing images and slogans for: Misoprostol for post-partum hemorrhage, intermittent preventive treatment for Malaria, Vitamin A supplementation, and deworming. (In-depth training on these interventions will take place in the coming months.) Craft supplies were distributed and the nearly 300 health workers spent one hour competing to develop the most creative, compelling, and scientifically accurate slogans and images to be used as behavior change communication tools throughout the MANSI project.
A panel of judges made up of doctors, public health professionals, and government officials recently selected three winning submissions for each health intervention. The winners received prizes and their slogans and images are being incorporated into the final behavior change communication strategy for the MANSI project.
To learn about another initiative that is tapping into creative energy to improve maternal health, visit MDGfive.com. MDGfive.com is a global project that is uniting artists around the world to use their collective artistic abilities to develop multimedia maternal health advocacy pieces.