Key Recommendations for Improving the Effectiveness and Scale up of Community-based and Interpersonal Communication

This 1-page summary shares recommendations from an AfriComNet meeting on interpersonal/community-based communication held in November 2012. Over 90 communication experts representing 10 countries met in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to take part in the Annual African Network for Strategic Communication in Health & Development (AfriComNet) Practicum on the theme: Community-based Communication for Comprehensive HIV Prevention in Africa: Evidence and Lessons. Participants noted a number of key recommendations as follows for improving the effectiveness and scale-up of community-based and interpersonal communication for HIV prevention communication:

• "Recommendation #1: Go "Small" in a big way - "Go small" means personalizing messages-making them as interactive and individualized as possible - while scaling up the delivery of those messages through a combination of community based, mass media and "new" media (i.e. mobile phones, social media). This maximizes effects while expanding reach.
• Recommendation #2: Scale up positive deviance - Build on uncommon but beneficial individual and community behaviors. People who act in a different way from the societal norms can be used as role models in the promotion of new beneficial behavior; and communities that have adopted positive social changes processes that differ from the norm can be examples for other communities. Such models, if widely disseminated, can demonstrate new ways to achieve positive changes among individuals as well as communities.
• Recommendation #3: Use social media for social change - Use social media to create dialogue around specific health and development issues instead of using them only for information dissemination.
• Recommendation #4: Bridge clusters of connected people so that small efforts produce bigger networks - Members of social networks tend to be homogeneous, are connected by social ties and shared interests and tend to communicate more often with each other, compared with individuals outside of the network. This makes networks a powerful way to reach people and bring about needed social pressure for behavior decisions.
• Recommendation #5: Develop standards and written tools/guidelines to support evidence-based communication interventions - Traditionally, standards and guidelines in HIV have been left to medical interventions where strict protocols are followed. There is also a need to standardize the content and processes used in interpersonal communication, such as peer education, client counseling, and community dialogue.
• Recommendation #6: Evaluate interpersonal and community based communication approaches and disseminate learning widely - Unfortunately, most interpersonal and community based communication interventions have not been evaluated to assess their effects on behavior, or to identify the key factors that improve effectiveness. Without this knowledge, there is little rationale for adopting one approach over another, or for continued funding of interpersonal communication interventions."