Discussion of climate change typically involves natural phenomena: raging wildfires, record flooding, ruinous drought. Less frequently examined, but equally important, is the effect of our warming planet on a child’s right to education.
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“A product that pretty much sells itself”: Packaging our field experience so it’s irresistible
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A version of this post originally appeared on K4 Health’s Blog. Reposted with permission.
While working on a U.S.-based project on obesity, I’d had a gratifying experience with concept testing. It confirmed what I’d thought for a long time – that concept testing, or trying a variety of concepts or message approaches with real audience members, can help you hone in on messages that really resonate.
I wanted to share my excitement and convince my international development colleagues that concept testing could work for them, too. So, I put together a PowerPoint for practitioners like myself, in the business of behavior change.
Despite a warm reception from my colleagues at a lunchtime presentation, a couple of eager 20-somethings were having trouble keeping their eyes open for the full 40 minutes. I tried again in one of our field offices overseas, but it didn’t really make sense to them because the whole project, focusing on obesity, was so very American. And even with a select, receptive audience (okay, I guess people closer to my demographic could sit through it…), my beautifully animated PowerPoint didn’t work without me there to deliver the story. I had a product, but I had to work pretty hard to sell it.
What I needed was a product that pretty much sells itself.
I needed a new case study on concept testing: one that featured an experience outside the U.S., and one that people could use and navigate on their own time and at their own pace. I turned to a younger colleague on our project, one who had been teaching herself the basics of video editing, is not intimidated by online mechanics, has a great sense of design, and “gets it” when it comes to behavior change.
Fortunately, our staff in Bangladesh liked the idea of concept testing, and with a little coaching by e-mail, had tried a version of it themselves. They were sold on concept testing as a way to focus their messaging before they dove into script writing for TV spots. Now we had a non-U.S.-based story to share.
My colleague and I shut the office door and surfed YouTube. We had a sweeping story that we wanted to tell succinctly. We typed in “movie trailers.” Voila: Gone with the Wind, the whole epic story summed up in 2½ minutes. We knocked ourselves out with a funny “how to” video on making a poster, and a complex lecture about the changing world of work, amusingly illustrated with text and cartoons, drawn as we watched.
Inspired, we started writing scripts for our own short “how to” videos and cobbled together some mock-ups, using the visuals and software we had at hand.
With no budget beyond our labor, we built a prototype web site with three short videos and took it out for a road test. We sat with a few colleagues and asked them to open the Beta version. One reviewer reminded us that a popular book on Web design is titled “Don’t make me think.” We reworked the page to make its purpose clear. We learned a lot about how to make our content shorter . We watched as people puzzled over what the site offered them – then taught ourselves to write explicit, brief text to tell them how they could put the tools to use. We learned that busy practitioners would delight in a sample script or research instrument. They told us they would download it and tuck it away for a training or technical assistance opportunity.
We launched in late March 2012. Already we’ve seen an uptick in visits to Alive & Thrive’s (A&T) Web site. During the three weeks after launch, the rate of people visiting the A&T site was almost double the rate of visitors in several recent months. We’ve gotten practitioners’ attention. One official cited the case study kit as the reason she thought to invite our Bangladesh country director to present at a regional conference.
Right now we’re deep into scripting our second kit: this one on engaging fathers in infant and young child feeding. And building on what we’ve learned, this time the videos will be two to three minutes, not four to five.
Technology makes glitz easy. But it takes more than glitz. Thinking like marketers has taken us a bit closer to building a product that “pretty much sells itself.”
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In the beautiful and remote Cambodian province of Pailin, FHI 360 is working with rural communities to reduce malaria transmission and save lives.
With support from the Global Fund through the Village Malaria Workers program, FHI 360 has trained people in 28 villages across this region to provide malaria education, diagnosis and treatment. Village workers have provided malaria testing to 13,351 fever patients in these remote areas, and have treated over 3,000 patients for malaria.
This World Malaria Day, visit Pailin by video. Your guide is an FHI 360 malaria program coordinator who shares how the program works.
Visit this page for more information about our recent work in Pailin, Cambodia.
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Kids in the United States spend a shocking amount of time in front of a screen each day. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, kids ages 8–18 spend an average of 7.5 hours of time in front of a screen for entertainment — be it a television, computer, videogame, tablet or smart phone. And to be clear, this isn’t time spent on the computer for school work, but rather time spent relaxing and having fun. And it really adds up — over a year, 7.5 hours per day comes to 114 days of total entertainment screen time!
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that kids get at least 60 minutes of physical activity each day, and time in front of a screen is time not spent being physically active. In an era when about one in six kids is obese, more than triple the number from 30 years ago, families and communities are getting engaged to make a change.
Working with the CDC, FHI 360 has developed an interactive and animated infographic called Screen Time vs. Lean Time, which addresses just some of the ways kids can be physically active instead of staring at a screen. It also provides tips for parents on ways to limit their own child’s screen time.
Click the image below to view the interactive infographic!
For more information about the work that we do in social marketing and communication, visit smcc.fhi360.org.
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Is Education Overlooking the Needs of Boys?
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In the early 1970s, many people began to question why girls did not seem interested in science and math and were not engaged in sports. Research demonstrated that it wasn’t because girls were incapable. Instead, socialization practices, teacher and parental expectations, and media messages told girls that these areas were “not for them.”
So, people went into action. Policymakers put legislation like Title IX in place, and companies changed how girls and women were portrayed in textbooks. It took more than ten years, but eventually the situation improved for girls.
All along, everybody assumed boys were doing just fine. But, current research shows that boys — particularly African-American and Latino boys — are being stigmatized in school. They are falling behind in reading and disengaging from school at a very early age, a trend that has disastrous long-term consequences.
In a chapter titled “Improving Boys’ Achievement in Early Childhood and Primary Education,” published in Lessons in Educational Equality by Oxford University Press, 2012, we synthesize international research about the difficulties boys experience in school and strategies to remedy the situation. The chapter grows out of research and curricula around raising and educating healthy boys that we’ve been doing since 2000. In brief, we argue that the lack of success young boys are experiencing is a gender equity issue, and it calls for some of the strategies that have worked to address gender equity in girls’ education. As a first step, we recommend restoring early education to its roots: making time for play, social-emotional development and exploration.
We found that in countries around the world, but especially the United States, even kindergarteners are spending an increasing amount of time being taught or tested in literacy and math. This mandated curriculum leaves little time for child-initiated learning or unstructured play and contributes to a rise in aggression and anxiety in young children. And, importantly, they don’t have the opportunity to develop critical social-emotional skills.
Diminishing opportunities for play and prosocial learning are especially disastrous for boys. It sets boys up for increased likelihood of violence, lower academic achievement and eventually disproportionately high drop-out rates.
International research is also finding that societal stereotypes about gender — ideas of what boys and girls are supposed to be like — contribute to boys’ lack of success in school.
For instance, a focus group of teachers and parents said boys were expected to be strong and to hide their emotions; those who didn’t would suffer a host of consequences such as being bullied and ostracized. They also said that energetic boys were thought to be troublemakers.
These expectations prevent boys from developing into psychologically healthy young men, and they often leave boys with the sense of being scrutinized, disliked or simply “bad.”
We recommend that teacher education include discussions about gender attitudes and how they affect the way teachers relate to both boys and girls. Change will require intentional focus and concerted effort. But that kind of effort is possible. After all, advocates changed national policies and scaled up programs for girls a generation ago.
To be sure, work on behalf of girls is not done. But we can apply some of that movement’s lessons to improving boys’ well-being and success in school. Ultimately, we believe that it is important to understand and meet all children’s needs in the classroom and that effective gender equity benefits both girls and boys.
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The Stories Behind the Statistics
“The Stories Behind the Statistics” is a series put together for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation‘s blog “Impatient Optimists” by the Interagency Youth Working Group (IYWG). The IYWG, housed here at FHI 360, provides technical leadership to improve the reproductive and sexual health of young people. The following posts were originally posted on “Impatient Optimists” and are reposted here with permission. All photos courtesy of the Gates Foundation.
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Young People and HIV
Last August, during World Youth Day in Madrid, I was conducting outreach to encourage Catholic youth to use condoms. It was there that I heard one of the most frightening things ever: One young man told me that an HIV-positive person had no right to have sex...
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Family Planning for Young Women
I lead a support group for mothers ages 12-19, in Kenya. Most of the mothers I work with are out-of-school youth; many live on the streets, work in the informal economy, or are orphaned. As a part of our support program, we provide weekly peer-to-peer sessions focusing on uptake of antenatal care...
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Youth Reproductive and Sexual Health
By the end of today, 2,500 young people will become infected with HIV and 1,400 girls and women will die in childbirth...
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STOP TB in My Lifetime — World TB Day
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Greetings to all! I recently had the opportunity to work with colleagues from FHI 360 and the National Tuberculosis Program (NTP) and National AIDS Program (NAP) in Indonesia. FHI 360 is a collaborating partner for USAID-sponsored work in Indonesia under the project called TB CARE I. We work with the Dutch organization KNCV, the World Health Organization and others to focus on integrating tuberculosis (TB) and HIV/AIDS activities and to improve access to TB care and treatment within prisons across that large and complex country.
Why are we at FHI 360 so focused on TB-HIV/AIDS integration? For a number of years, we have been working with governments to build stronger HIV/AIDS programs around the globe. What we and others have learned is that the number-one killer of people living with HIV/AIDS is TB. There is a very close, causal link between TB and HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS makes it many times more likely that a person will get sick with or die from TB. In addition, TB makes the HIV/AIDS virus replicate even more quickly, leading to further immune suppression and AIDS-related illness and death. Recent published research has shown that life-saving interventions include rapid initiation of TB treatment after diagnosis and rapid initiation of antiretroviral therapy (ART) after TB treatment gets started. Furthermore, isoniazid preventive treatment (IPT) can save lives by keeping people with HIV/AIDS from getting TB. An even more powerful approach for individuals already infected with the HIV virus is to get them started on ART before their immune systems become too weak.
In addition to my key objective of reviewing our TB-HIV/AIDS activities and the prison program, I served as a plenary speaker at the Indonesia Infectious Diseases Update Symposium in Malang, Indonesia. I also provided lectures and on-site consultation for members of the NTP, NAP and FHI 360 staff, focusing on multi-drug resistant TB, TB-HIV/AIDS and IPT. Our discussions showed how challenging it is to implement good programs with limited resources.
Other TB-related issues are also critical to solve. These include improving universal access to high-quality TB diagnosis and treatment, preventing spread of disease from one person to the next — especially within hospitals and clinics — and identifying and preventing disease among young children, who are at high risk for severe TB. USAID-TB CARE I provides funding to FHI 360 to work on these and related issues in Cambodia, Indonesia, Mozambique, Nigeria and Zambia.
In keeping with the theme for World TB Day 2012, “STOP TB in My Lifetime,” I want to see the epidemic of TB-HIV/AIDS become a distant memory. I am happy to report that my colleagues in Indonesia are working hard to make this come true.
World TB Day is Saturday, March 24, 2012. For more information, please visit the Stop TB Partnership’s World TB Day site.
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FHI 360 Celebrates World Water Day
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Americans on average use 400 liters of water per day and Europeans use 200 liters of water per day. Yet, in the developing world the average person uses only 10 liters of water per day, and this water may not even be safe for drinking.
World Water Day, held every March 22, brings attention to the fact that much of the world still struggles daily to get enough water for drinking, sanitation and hygiene. We can all have a role in improving this situation. The theme for World Water Day this year is Water and Food Security. Do you know how much water you consume every day and how much water it took to produce the food you eat? How can you change your diet and your habits to reduce your water footprint? To learn how much water you use and get a full list of events worldwide, visit the U.N.’s World Water Day site. In Washington, D.C., the World Water Day DC Coalition has two full days of events planned for March 21-22. For more information about these events, visit www.waterday.org.
FHI 360 and its partners have adapted innovative ways to help families living in water-scarce locations engage in good hygiene practices and ensure there is enough clean, safe water to drink and a way to wash hands, even if there is no running water. A simple, easy-to-make devise known as a tippy tap can be made using local materials. One kind of tippy tap can be made by hanging a water-filled plastic bottle with holes in the cap to act as a faucet. When set up around a home or schoolyard, children can be taught the importance of washing their hands at appropriate times — especially before eating and after using the toilet. (Learn how to make a tippy tap here). In addition, rain water harvesting can collect water from the roof of a house to use for hand washing, bathing, watering gardens and other household uses.
The WASHplus project, led by FHI 360 and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, supports healthy households and communities by creating and delivering interventions that lead to improvements in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). WASHplus recently initiated a project in Zambia to work with schools in two provinces to increase their ability to provide adequate water and hygiene and sanitation facilities for students. Reliable supplies of safe drinking water, as well as water for hand washing and latrines, can contribute to improved attendance and better learning through fewer days lost to diarrheal diseases and other illnesses. And fewer girls will need to miss school or drop out because of a lack of water or a separate latrine, which is especially important for menstrual hygiene as girls grow older.
FHI 360 is also the coordinator for the Public–Private Partnership for Handwashing (PPPHW), an international coalition to promote hand washing and child health globally. The PPPHW supports organizations that want to increase hand washing in their communities. For example, a nongovernmental organization called Share Our Lunch, which provides healthy meals and health education to vulnerable communities in Ghana, reached out to the PPPHW for help. Share Our Lunch wanted advice on how to incorporate hand-washing training into their community lunches. The PPPHW introduced them to tippy taps and directed them to the necessary resources. Share Our Lunch now reports that the tippy taps are a great success, with kids clamoring to use this “fun” new technology to wash their hands before they eat.
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Symposium on Sustainability
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The human population surpassed seven billion in October 2011, a milestone noted by many concerned about our planet’s capacity to sustain additional billions in the coming years. Inspired by this milestone, FHI 360 hosted a symposium on “Population, Development, and the Environment: Integrated Solutions for Global Challenges” on February 19, 2012 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Vancouver — one of the world’s largest and most diverse general scientific gatherings. Presented with our colleagues Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka and Vicky Markham, the symposium follows on a 2010 Policy Forum in the journal Science that addressed the ways in which population growth intersects with other areas of human development, including reproductive health, social and economic development, and environmental sustainability.
First, we highlighted the connection between sustainability and the 215 million women worldwide who have an unmet need for family planning. In particular, we demonstrated how improving women’s access to contraceptive choice positively affects other areas of human development such as maternal and child health, educational attainment, HIV prevention, gender equity, and social and economic development. We underscored the critical role the scientific community has in further examining and addressing these essential connections.
We also shared the preliminary outcomes of a groundbreaking project in Uganda that aims to improve the health of both human communities and mountain gorilla communities, demonstrating that economic development and environmental sustainability can go hand in hand.
Finally, we explained how the United States has an essential role to play as it represents only 1/20 of the planet’s population but consumes one quarter of its natural resources. We looked at the impact of these factors on both the global environment and on women around the world.
The session was very well attended. Our audience included scientists, engineers, development workers, students and technology professionals, all of whom expressed enthusiasm about our message that healthy people and a healthy planet are interdependent.
Connections are at the heart of sustainable development — connections among population growth, reproductive rights, global and public health, food security, livelihoods and environmental preservation. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with champions from diverse fields to achieve truly comprehensive global health and development.
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For girls and women, change is here
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Just in time for International Women’s Day, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) released a new gender policy on March 1st. More comprehensive than the former 30-year-old policy, the new policy is a big step forward in the ability of the agency and its partners to tackle the root causes of gender inequality through development work.
USAID Deputy Administrator Don Steinberg emphasized that the agency is integrating gender “into the DNA” of everything they do to more adequately respond to the vast gender-related barriers that persist all over the globe. The new policy will serve as a guide for efforts to change the social norms that, in so many places, continue to lead to gender inequalities and worse. Deep-rooted changes in social mores are needed, as well as a comprehensive approach to the many factors that influence how girls and women fare all over the world.
One such place is Katanga Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Here, when a girl is beaten by a boy in her school, it is not an isolated incident but rather the tip of the iceberg in a country struggling to end conflict-related sexual violence and mend its torn social safety net.Currently, FHI 360 is leading a project under its C-Change program to influence attitudes and practices in 31 schools in Katanga and surrounding communities. The project engages parents, teachers and students to diminish the instance of school-related gender-based violence. In this preventive program, participants are using innovative avenues of communication for social and behavior change to tackle, at the school and community levels, the underlying factors that make such violence a part of everyday life. For example, teacher mentors use a Congolese-appropriate Safe Schools Guide to work with designated youth clubs to discuss and strategize how to make schools safer.
Attaining gender equality takes long-term vision and time. Programs such as C-Change are tackling the foundation of gender inequality: unequal gender norms. Gains for women are being achieved, while making men champions of gender equality.
If the arc of opportunity is long, to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it bends toward equality. And we have to be there to meet it.
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SMARTgirls: Voices from Cambodia
This month, Degrees is sharing stories from participants in SMARTgirl, an FHI 360-led program aimed at preventing and mitigating the impact of HIV among entertainment workers living in Cambodia. The program provides peer education and social support, and improves access to HIV and reproductive health services. SMARTgirl treats entertainment workers respectfully and celebrates their positive qualities. SMARTgirl is funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
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Somany’s struggles
Twenty-three-year-old Somany is a transgender entertainment worker who has HIV. Social stigma from the community and ostracism from her family leave Somany with a deep sense of loneliness and isolation. Speaking candidly to a SMARTgirl support group, she related how every day feels like a...
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Lang’s secret
My name is Lang. My parents and friends back in my hometown don't know what I'm really doing here in Phnom Penh. They think I'm studying English and training in a wedding reception center...
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Sopheap’s strength
Sopheap was born male but, at age 10, realized she identified as a girl. Because Sopheap’s parents feared other people’s responses, she wore boys’ clothing until age 17 “because I had to go to school and my parents didn’t like me wearing girls’ clothes.” Since then, Sopheap’s parents have...
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Sineng’s diagnosis
Sineng, 21, works in a beer hall in Phnom Penh, where her job is to serve and entertain men. Sometimes she sells sex to make extra money. In the last month, she was diagnosed with HIV. Sineng fears how the virus will affect her health, her relationships and her job. Afraid and timid, she stood...
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Nguyen’s Day
Twenty-six-year-old Nguyen's1 husband is a shoemaker, but his income of approximately 40 U.S. dollars a month is not enough to support them and their two children. To help make ends meet — including paying the monthly rent of 30 dollars on their one-room home — Nguyen supplements the household...
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Kimthy’s Story
My name is Kimthy1 and I’m living far from home, where my son and mother are. I’m selling sex in Phnom Penh, and it’s a lifestyle I want to keep quiet about. My hometown community already dislikes me, so I’m not going to tell them what I do or that I’m HIV positive...
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Celebrating International Women’s Day all month
Today is International Women’s Day. Rather than celebrate it for just one day, FHI 360 will pay tribute to women throughout the month of March by sharing stories from participants in the SMARTgirl program...
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