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Redesigning an education project for child friendly radio: a multisectoral collaboration to promote children’s health, education, and human rights after a humanitarian crisis in Sierra Leone (BMJ 2018; 363 :k4667)

In this paper the authors describe how an educational project was rapidly adapted into a radio education programme after the 2014 Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone.

In May 2014, Sierra Leone reported its first case of Ebola in Kailahun, a remote, marginalised, and impoverished district bordering Liberia. The district had one of the highest concentrations of Ebola infections during this outbreak. After this, over 1600 children were orphaned and gender inequalities were exacerbated . Public health control measures put in place by the government of Sierra Leone included closing all schools and prohibiting public congregation.

The educational programme “Getting Ready for School”, funded by the UK charity Comic Relief, had been operating since its launch in 2011 within 21 schools in Kailahun. While many other educational services stopped entirely in Kailahun, the Getting Ready for School programme was redesigned as a radio education programme called Pikin to Pikin Tok (PtPT), meaning Child to Child Talk, in Krio. The lead consortium partner was Child to Child, a UK based international child rights non-governmental organisation (NGO) (www.childtochild.org.uk), and the lead implementing partner was Pikin-To-Pikin (www.pikintopikin.org), a local NGO. The goals and objectives of the project changed in response to the circumstances in Sierra Leone; this required a substantially different approach by the redesigned scheme than in the original project. The entire effort, from starting the school project to the end of the radio project, ran from 2011 to 2016.

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Participatory Research Toolkit (Rain Barrel Communications, 2018)

This toolkit gathers together a wide variety of participatory research tools developed over a 20-year period and used in multiple social and behaviour change communication (SBCC) projects around the world. Examples are provided from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Mozambique, Nepal, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone.

All of the tools presented have been tried and tested. A majority of them have been used with adolescents. However, children, women, men, key influentials and, indeed, whole communities have used them.

The tookit provides an overarching description of the tool as a whole, next, there is a list of topics and countries where the research team has had first-hand experience of working with these tools, and then there is a selection of concrete examples. Finally, each tool is accompanied by suggested “how-to’s” with step by step instructions, tips and techniques that have been employed in real-world settings.

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Solutions brief: entertainment-education to address child marriage (Girls Not Brides, 2017)

Mass media has long been recognised as a way to prompt large-scale behaviour change. But can it change the norms and beliefs which perpetuate child marriage?

This brief takes a look at what entertainment-education is and its potential for addressing a complex social issue such as child marriage. It also contains a list of useful resources on the issue.

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Learning from the Ebola Response in cities: Communication and Engagement (ALNAP Lessons Paper, 2017)

The West African Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak in 2014/15 posed a number of urban-specific challenges to humanitarians responding to the crisis. ALNAP’s Learning from the Ebola Response in cities series brings together the lessons learnt from the response in West Africa, with each paper focusing on a topic: quarantine, population movement, and communication.

This paper describes how humanitarians communicated and engaged with urban stakeholders in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. It focuses in particular on how humanitarians navigated urban notions of community, a dense and mobile population, participation in an environment of little trust and other related issues.

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Using media and communication to respond to public health emergencies – lessons learned from Ebola (BBC Media Action Practice Briefing 2016)

This practice briefing sets out what BBC Media Action learned in delivering and supporting health communication in response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa in 2014–15. It has a particular focus on Sierra Leone as this was the hub of the organisation’s response.

The paper aims to contribute to a body of knowledge about how to best harness and deploy media and communication in public health emergencies. It also underscores the need for the global community to plan and invest in communication long before any crises take hold, to ensure that communication plays a central role in reducing the impact of future crisis events.

The paper sets out the specific communication challenge posed by Ebola and why it was so difficult to get to grips with this in the early months of the outbreak. It then documents when the health communication response became more useful and explores what that tells us about effective media and communication. Finally, it offers recommendations to ensure that media and communication are used to their full potential during other disease outbreaks or humanitarian crises.

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