The other week I attended a round-table discussion for strategic health communication experts and implementers of behavior change communication (BCC) programming in Uganda. I’ve mentioned before that one thing I love about my job is the opportunity it provides me to engage in such national-level discussions but also to interact with local communities through regular field exposure.

A great number of NGOs attended this “think-tank” meeting, with the goal of sharing successes and challenges in implementing BCC interventions and exploring possible avenues for collaboration. (I liked what our USAID Senior Technical Advisor said about the three C’s: collaboration, coordination, and complimentarity between partners.)

Listening to all the various organizations share their experiences affirmed my thinking that there is some really fascinating work going on in the BCC world in Uganda! One example, which I’ve mentioned on my blog before, is PSI’s GoRed campaign, which encourages faithfulness, love and respect in marriage and mainly targets younger couples in urban areas. The PSI team presented data that Ugandan men are 5x more likely to be unfaithful than Ugandan women. They also presented data showing that 83% of married Ugandan couples are faithful (I find that figure a little bit hard to believe), but their point was that even though people perceive unfaithfulness to be the norm, there is a substantial percentage of married couples who are faithful. The PSI team explained how they are effectively trying to “steal” the color red, so that anytime you see someone putting on red, you can use that as a launchpad for discussion about faithfulness. I think they want “red” to become a catchphrase too, so that anytime a married person gets propositioned for an extra-marital affair, they can say, “I’m red.” (Red stands for Reliable, Exceptional, and Dependable.) Kampala is plastered with GoRed billboards, and the ads play in popular places like the Cineplex and on the TV screens at Nando’s. I always find campaigns that encompass changing norms to be extremely interesting, but challenging work. I think this is a very important issues in Uganda, where marriage is a risk factor for HIV acquisition.

Another neat example is some new work done by the Straight Talk Foundation, an organization that publishes free newspapers for youth (and now also for parents and teachers) on health, sexual and reproductive health, and other development issues. It tries to address these issues mainly through sharing true life stories of young people in the country. Straight Talk has enjoyed enormous success from its modest beginnings, and keeps growing and expanding. Its latest initiative, to be unveiled soon, is an SMS project in partnership with Grameen and MTN. Here’s how it works: a kid with a health concern sends a text message to a toll-free MTN hotline, and within a short time frame, they receive a text message from Straight Talk addressing their concern and also providing them with a list of clinics in their area that can assist them with that particular problem. The project has already been piloted at Kyambogo University, and will go country-wide soon.

Several organizations talked frankly about health communication strategies or materials that didn’t work so well. One organization pointed out that the currently nationally favored slogan for FP, “Plan a small, manageable family for a better life” sometimes implies that family planning is for the poor and that people who perceive themselves be well-off don’t need family planning.

The meeting was hosted by the organization where I did my master’s internship, the Health Communication Partnership. Although there has been quite a bit of turnover of staff since my internship days, there are a lot of familiar faces and people I fondly remember working with. It always catches me off guard when people I wouldn’t expect to necessarily remember me (me, the measly intern who toiled there for eight months over a year ago!), but everyone from the driver to the groundskeeper to the guy who started a week before my internship ended greet me by name and a smile.

In keeping with my pledge to make this blog more visually appealing with more pictures, here’s a photo someone emailed to me after the meeting.