Using media technologies for learning about health and building healthy communities
Good health is a prerequisite for learning, earning a livelihood, raising children and contributing to the community and its development. Throughout the Commonwealth, however, disease and illness still take an enormous toll on communities, their education systems, their members’ livelihoods and productivity.
COL’s Healthy Communities initiative, established in 2009, addresses Millennium Development Goals in increasing access to learning opportunities by all citizens (female and male, leaders and the disadvantaged, the young and the old), especially healthcare workers and through community-based groups, in developing regions of the Commonwealth. The initiative enables better individual and community responses to maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS, nutrition and fitness, the environment, and other health and development challenges, particularly those faced by women and youth.
COL’s aim is to build the capacities of groups working at the local level – community networks, public offices, health groups, local media, etc. – to develop, deliver and evaluate non-formal open and distance learning programmes using community and public media, particularly radio, mobile devices, and other appropriate technologies and means.
Activities centre on the core strategies of the Healthy Communities initiative:
- Developing flexible, low-cost, high-impact models
- Capacity-building of national and regional agencies and working in partnership to achieve greater scale
- Developing district-level learning programmes
- Training and advocacy materials
- Supporting policy feedback and formation
Health in the Commonwealth
The Commonwealth’s 54 states account for almost a third of the world’s population, but two-thirds of global maternal deaths, two-thirds of global HIV/AIDS cases, two-thirds of global children under five suffering from malnutrition and nearly half of infant deaths in the world (Commonwealth Secretariat).
Faced with serious, often escalating challenges, communities throughout the developing world have urgent needs for health and development education and particularly for approaches that link participatory learning to action, both individual and collective. More…
Healthy Communities & Community Health
The concept of “healthy communities” combines a broad understanding of “good health” with a community approach to achieving it. “Healthy communities” considers health as part of general community well-being and community development.
The “healthy community” model is similar to “community health”. Both approaches help us to look beyond health as a purely medical issue or solely individual issue to see it in a more inclusive, holistic way, as a community concern. More...
Learning for Health and Development
The knowledge needed to prevent or solve health problems is often simple; however the processes needed to make learning relevant and accessible, to realise knowledge acquisition and to enable individual and collective action about health and community development rarely are.
COL is therefore concerned with educational and developmental processes, models and flexible methodologies that make possible health and developmental learning and positive behavioural and social change.
COL’s Healthy Communities initiative applies the principles and practices of open and distance learning (ODL) to non-formal education and training – helping citizens to learn about their own health and well-being and helping communities to dialogue and work towards solving community health and other development challenges. More...
Community-based ODL Programmes
COL’s approach to health and development education is based in communication for development strategies, blending outcome-oriented learning design with process-oriented dialogue and stakeholder participation.
COL’s community learning programme model has developed through collaboration with a range of partner agencies and fieldwork in different areas of the Commonwealth. More...
Community Media & Mobile Telephony
Since learning needs are greatest in remote and resource-poor areas where infrastructure, services, literacy and basic education are often severely limited, COL and its partners identify low-cost and scalable technologies such as radio and mobile telephony as part of a multichannel approach.
Community media address local issues in local languages, involving local learners and intermediaries. They are relatively low-cost, and can be driven and sustained with local resources. Given that radio remains the most accessible learning medium for the majority of the world’s poor, community radio has a special place in COL’s work. More...