To effect change, it was crucial to engage the wider community and to leverage existing community platforms to maximise the impact of our interventions.
The Shaping Demand and Practices (SDP) project aimed to help married women become more empowered to take better care of themselves and their children, but also to encourage men, who control household spending, to become more informed and take greater responsibility for the health of their families. Research suggested that mothers-in-law – key decision makers in the family and traditional bearers of knowledge about maternal and child health – also needed to be actively engaged and encouraged to make the healthiest possible choices for their families, supporting their sons and daughters-in-law to do the same, even if this meant new ways of doing things.
Our aim, therefore, was to employ fresh thinking about potential communication platforms to ensure that all possible opportunities for audience interaction were explored.