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Learn how we use evidence-based behaviour change campaigns to improve and save lives in low-income countries.
Learn about how DMI brings together two different worlds: demonstrable scientific practice and creative storytelling.
Location Nutrition
Millions of Mozambican children are chronically malnourished. To address this, we worked with the World Food Programme (WFP) and community radio stations in the Manica province to design and run behaviour change programmes, according to our Saturation+ methodology, to improve nutrition outcomes.
Mozambique
Nutrition – Encouraging exclusive breastfeeding amongst infants, complementary feeding and varied diets amongst mothers and children, as well as malaria prevention and treatment, particularly during pregnancy.
121 x 1-minute radio spots produced in 10 languages.
This project ran from May 2016 to February 2018. The radio campaign was broadcast for 12 months on seven community radio stations in Manica province.
1.7 million
Science
One third of the Mozambican population is chronically food-insecure, and 43% of children under 5 are under-nourished. To address this, the government of Mozambique worked with the European Union to implement a three-year food and nutrition security programme in Mozambique. To support the World Food Programme, we helped seven community radio stations in Manica province to run nutrition behaviour change campaigns, training them in our Saturation+ methodology.
Stories
The World Food Programme carried out research into what was preventing nutrition-related behaviour change in the population. Barriers included beliefs in supernatural forces controlling one’s health, lack of information about the benefits of a varied diet or how to maximise the use of local produce, as well as the mistaken belief that breastfeeding alone is not enough for infants under 6-months old (and that breastfeeding should be supplemented with additional liquids).
Based on these findings, we ran four workshops of four to six weeks each with community radio station members. During these workshops, DMI’s Mozambique team supported the stations to write eight scripts addressing a target behaviour, pretested the scripts, and produced eight radio spots, first in Portuguese and then in seven other local languages.
Saturation
On conclusion of each training period, the community radio stations would broadcast the produced spots 10 times per day, for three months. In total, we helped our radio station partners produce 121 spots in 10 languages, broadcasting the campaign for a total of 24 months.
Our Impact
We did not measure behaviour change or health impact of our radio campaign for this project. The campaign did positively affect our radio station partners. Within months of project end, one of our community radio station partners, Radio Communitaria Sussundenga was contacted to produce a series of spots for a national NGO in Mozambique. Additionally, one of the spots we created with the seven stations was adapted into a rap song by a local artist and was widely played on the radio in Manica province.
This project was funded by the European Commission in partnership with the World Food Programme (WFP).