Addressing Communications Campaign Development Challenges to Reduce Stunting in Indonesia

Stunted growth, also known as stunting and nutritional stunting, is a reduced growth rate in human development. It is a primary manifestation of malnutrition (or more precisely undernutrition) and recurrent infections, such as diarrhea and helminthiasis, in early childhood and even before birth, due to malnutrition during fetal development brought on by a malnourished mother. One in four children under 5 years of age in the developing world are stunted (chronically malnourished). Reducing stunting can be a challenge, especially in populous countries where families are dispersed, as is the case in Indonesia.

This paper described how one government project (Indonesia’s National Nutrition Communication Campaign [NNCC]) delivered effective behavior change communications interventions that reached 40 million people. This paper focused on four challenges that nutrition campaigns often face: engaging stakeholders, engaging journalists, adapting messages, and utilizing media and described specific efforts and lessons learned within the NNCC context and provide key recommendations for future programs.

The useful lessons included the following: 1) Fully engaging stakeholders at all levels in campaign design and implementation ensured broad-based support for stunting reduction efforts; 2) Pro-actively involving journalists in nutrition campaigns improved public opinion about stunting and positively influenced decision-making in policy formulation; 3) Use of humorous public service announcements with limited technical information was effective in engaging priority populations; and 4) Social media (YouTube ads, web advertorials, Facebook pages, Twitter, Instagram) extended the campaign’s reach and reinforced messaging from other sources.

In short, NNCC’s experience designing and implementing a media campaign, combined with insights from other campaigns, can guide the development of similar media interventions. And on-going process evaluations are needed to identify bottlenecks in the implementation of large-scale media campaigns and operations research should be used to test solutions to those bottlenecks. Governments and other implementing organizations should consider rigorously executed randomized intervention trials and other study designs to assess the impact of various campaign components on community knowledge, attitudes, and practices related to nutrition.

Article by Cougar Hall, et al, from USA, Indonesia and Tanzania.

Full access: http://t.cn/EbVPTDz

Image by bitterbutter2000, from Flickr-cc.