During the month of May, IMPACT will be highlighting USAID’s work in Global Health. From May 1-10, we will be featuring the role that Science, Technology & Innovation plays in Global Health.

It is 1 p.m. in the village of Kavimvira. The sun is high over Lake Tanganyika, at the foot of the Mitumba Mountain, in scenic South Kivu. Frank Baraka has packed the bounty of the morning fishing trip and folded his nets, when his cell phone chimes to signal an incoming text message: : “Sleep every night under an Insecticide-Treated Net (ITN), to protect your family from malaria,” he reads out loud, amused, to his fishing companion.

 

“This is exactly the message my wife has been pounding at home lately,” Roger Amisi responds. “She says that she heard it at the ETL (Education-Through-Listening) meeting, with Nathalie, you know, the primary school teacher.”

Delaying his lunch, Frank hurries to Nathalie Niéla’s compound to find out about the messages.  “Malaria kills children in our community,” Nathalie says. “Sleep under a net every night, to live safe from malaria,” she confirms.

This is the call to action of the Malaria 3+1 Campaign implemented by USAID’s Democratic Republic of Congo-Integrated Health Project (DRC-IHP), in partnership with C-Change. An estimated 140,949 Congolese from 194 villages were exposed to campaign messages on malaria awareness and prevention. In a country where only five percent of pregnant women receive proper preventive malaria therapy, and malaria accounts for nearly 40 percent of child deaths, prevention is a critical priority.

Nathalie is one of 37 women ETL facilitators recently trained in the DRC-IHP’s field office of Uvira.  “Thanks to ETL, our husbands no longer use the nets to fish or to protect vegetable gardens,” she affirms proudly. “Nets now serve their purpose of protecting children and pregnant women from mosquito bites.”

ETL is one pillar of IHP’s Tuendeni-Kumpala Behavior Change Communication strategy which empowers communities to adopt health-seeking behaviors. Tuendeni-Kumpala which means “moving forward” in Swahili and Tshiluba (two local languages), is an integrated strategy in which ETL facilitators work in synergy with other innovative communication approaches such as mobile technology, to increase the reach and enhance the behavioral impact of project interventions such as malaria prevention and use of reproductive health services.

Through this partnership between USAID, DRC-IHP and C-Change, a total of 64,584 ITNs were distributed across Bukavu, Kolwezi, Uvira, and Kamina, supporting the effort to boost the number of people using insecticide-treated nets.  Campaign results from two health zones point to the value of ETL, in terms of actual ITN use. After four months, 89 percent of the 9,471 households exposed to campaign activities in Uvira slept every night under an ITN.  By contrast, 82 percent of the 12,965 households involved in Kamina (Katanga province) reported adoption of the preventive behavior. When the campaign was launched in June 2012, ETL was not yet rolled out in Kamina.

For the project’s communication team, the difference illustrates the powerful effect of ETL. “ETL truly shows results here,” said Donat Ngoyi, DRC-IHP Communication Expert in Uvira.  “This approach will, no doubt, help us meet our malaria prevention and treatment goals.”

The DRC-Integrated Health Project (DRC-IHP) — a five-year USAID cooperative agreement led by Management Sciences for Health in partnership with the International Rescue Committee, and Overseas Strategic Consulting, Ltd — is strengthening the leadership and governance capacity of people working in the health sector to improve the access, availability, and quality of services within 80 target health zones.

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