Soul Beat Malaria Extra - Issue #1

A group of implementing partners engaged in SBCC for malaria prevention and control met in Nairobi, Kenya, July 26 – 27 2011, for a consultative meeting on a Five-Year Global Strategic Framework for Malaria SBCC at the country level. C-Change hosted the meeting and took the lead in facilitating it. This is the second in a series of consultations that seek to develop guidelines on best practice in SBCC at the country level for malaria control and prevention and to chart out a research, implementation, and evaluation agenda for Roll Back Malaria (RBM) partners, donor organisations, and national malaria control programmes.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) is collaborating with a health monitoring service in Botswana to use technology to detect malaria outbreaks and stop them before they spread too far. HP is providing webOS-based Pre 2 smartphones and cloud computing technology to the nonprofit group Positive Innovation for the Next Generation (PING) to monitor disease outbreaks in the African country. The programme is part of HP's new strategy to deal with charitable donations; it now gives in-kind technology and expertise where it once donated money. The programme shows how mobile technology can help change the world.

This initiative uses information and communication technology (ICT) to foster understanding of the challenges posed worldwide by malaria. The Malaria Atlas Project (MAP) is a multinational team of researchers funded by the Wellcome Trust that assembles medical intelligence and survey data to provide evidence-based maps on the distribution of malaria risk, human population, disease burdens, mosquito vectors, inherited blood disorders, and malaria financing and control worldwide. The maps generated are the results of collaboration between malaria scientists in the United Kingdom (UK), Kenya, Vietnam, Indonesia, Ecuador, and the United States (US).

The President's Malaria Initiative (PMI) seeks to reduce malaria-related deaths by 50 percent in 15 focus countries in Africa by expanding coverage of effective malaria prevention and treatment measures to the most vulnerable populations: pregnant women and children under five years of age. To access communication materials developed by USAID/PMI partners go to the PMI Special Collection on C-Hub. C-Hub is a service of C-Change that provides a place to find and share communication materials on development.

This 4-page policy brief discusses the role of the patent medicine vendor (PMV) in dispensing anti-malarial drugs (AMDs) in Nigeria where fake medicines and those to which the malaria parasite has become highly resistant are a danger. The brief makes a series of recommendations including training for PMVs, community education, greater community involvement in monitoring and the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to provide real-time information and support.

The Soul Beat Malaria Extra e-magazine, supported by PMI and C-Change and implemented by Soul Beat Africa, is an e-magazine that highlights social and behaviour change communication (SBCC) case studies, reports, analyses, and resources related to Malaria. Please encourage your colleagues and friends to subscribe here http://comminit.com/malaria-africa/user/register and select Malaria under Development Issues.

In September 2007, a mobile recording studio was set up in Bo, Sierra Leone, initiated by Christian Aid, to help the town's musicians and HIV peer educators make an album of anti-HIV songs called "HIV e dae-o" (HIV is Real). Music was subsequently recorded in Malawi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and an animated film was created about malaria for use in the DRC. The DRC initiative uses animation and music to inform people about how, by following a few simple steps, they can protect themselves and their families from malaria.

Launched in June 2008, the five-year Support to National Malaria Programme (SuNMaP) is working to increase access to, and coverage of, preventive and curative malaria control interventions in at least six Nigerian states. The Malaria Consortium is implementing the programme in collaboration with a group of international partners, with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communication Programs (JHU/CCP) tasked with increasing community awareness and demand for effective malaria treatment and prevention. SuNMaP is designed to harmonise donor efforts and funding agencies around agreed-upon national policies and plans for malaria control, and to strengthen the National Malaria Control Programme to provide crucial coordination. SuNMaP focuses on economically poor and vulnerable populations and combines capacity building, strengthening public-private partnerships, and awareness raising, with distribution of long lasting insecticide treated nets (LLINs). It has also developed communication training modules for health agents, clinicians, patent medicine vendors and role model mothers.

In September 2010, C-Change and the Maternal and Child Health Integrated Program (M-CHIP) organised a webinar on best practices in communication for community-based malaria programmes. HealthPartners Uganda, Concern Universal Malawi, and grant recipients of the Malaria Communities Program (MCP) of the United States (US) President's Malaria Initiative provided narrated PowerPoint presentations that responded to the following questions:

1. How is your programme linked to a national strategy and how is it scalable?
2. What are the key barriers to achieving positive malaria prevention and care behaviours and how are you using data to address those barriers?
3. How are your interventions addressing these barriers?
   The presentations are available on Slideshare:
   HealthPartners - Applying Behavior Change Communication to Prevent and Treat Malaria in Uganda
   Concern Universal - Phalombe Malaria Communities Project

Activities in this training guide cover technical information on malaria as well as skills to help supervisors and volunteers work at the community level on malaria issues.
Module 1 – This training guide for supervisors aims to provide an introduction to the supervisor training and to assess understanding of the principles of adult education, effective public speaking techniques, and malaria technical information.
Module 2 - Training guide for supervisors and volunteers

By the end of the training, volunteers are expected to be able to:

• provide accurate information on how malaria is spread, how it can be prevented, and how it is treated;
• demonstrate the ability to communicate effectively with households about malaria and its prevention and treatment;
• demonstrate the ability to explain and encourage the hanging and use of LLINs; and
• monitor malaria prevention activities in their communities.

Register to participate
If you are active on or interested in effective malaria action please join the Soul Beat: Malaria Social Network at http://networks.comminit.com/malaria/user/register

Share your knowledge
Do you have programme descriptions, strategic planning documents, training manuals, or other resources you think are useful to other working on SBCC and Malaria? If you do please go to the knowledge sharing area of Soul Beat Africa's Malaria Network where, once you've registered, you can upload the resources you want to share.

This publication is made possible by the support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the terms of Agreement No. GPO-A-00-07-00004-00. The contents are the responsibility of The Communication Initiative and the C-Change project, managed by FHI 360, and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.