THE United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) has developed a new communication strategy with a view to achieving measurable changes in social norms and individual behaviours in favour of children and the population at large at the community level.
The new communication module has some strategic major shifts from messages to dialogue, from focusing on individual behaviour to focusing on collective social change and from expert-driven solutions to community-driven ones.
The approach is a large-scale, integrated, human-oriented and evidence-based, and is to be applied on major interventions such as exclusive breast feeding, corporal punishment and birth registration, scale attendant delivery, hand washing, Insecticide Treated Net and Diarrhoea Treatment with Oral Re-hydration Solution (ORS) and zinc.
Addressing a capacity-building workshop on the strategies, the UNICEF representative in Ghana, Dr Yasmin Ali Haque, urged the participants to pursue the power of participation in addressing behavioural patterns.
The participants were drawn from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as the Catholic Relief Services (CRS), World Vision International (WVI), Ghana Health Service (GHS), Afram Plains Development Organisation, Pronet, Ghana Education Service (GES), Ghana Red Cross and Community Water and Sanitation Agencies.
Dr Haque said all departments must be inter-dependent on one another, saying that it was the only way they could get to their target groups in schools and health facilities.
The Programme Manager of the Ghana Health Service, Ms Veronica Gomez, said the communication for development approach was participatory and would bring social change to find solutions to some health issues, which, hitherto, had been deeply entrenched in socio-cultural norms.
She said the exposure for participants from the GHS and the GES would empower them to roll out interventions with ease.
On behalf of the participants from NGOs, the Programme Manager of CRS, Mrs Clara Lamisi Woebong, said new methodologies for behavioural change were crucial to reaching all decentralised structures at the regional, district and sub-district levels.
He said more of such workshops were needed to empower and sustain them to roll out their programmes effectively.
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