What are the advantages and disadvantages of community-managed hygiene promotion and public health communication programmes?
Updated - Monday 28 November 2005
What are the advantages and disadvantages of community-managed hygiene promotion and public health communication programmes?
Hygiene promotion programmes cannot coerce people to start using facilities they do not feel are suitable or sustainable. However, hygiene promotion can play a supporting role in technical projects by creating an understanding of the (health) implications of various options and providing follow-up for proper use and maintenance.
In community-managed programmes for hygiene change, trained local or external health educators help communities or local groups to establish and manage their own programmes and organizations to realize the changes they want. In doing so, they use the community organization approach to health and hygiene, and insights and methods from adult education.
Programmes using public health communication programmes combine the use of mass media with personal contacts to stimulate large numbers of individuals and households to change specific behaviours directly, without formulating their own programmes and forming their own hygiene management organizations.
Each approach has advantages and disadvantages and which approach to select, or whether to use a combination of the two, depends on factors like: the context in which the hygiene promotion takes place; the types of behaviour requiring change; and the number of people to be reached.
| Advantages And Disadvantages Of Community-Managed Hygiene Programmes And Public Health Communication Programmes |
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| Advantages | Disadvantages |
| Community-managed hygiene programmes | + The programme is fully based on people's immediate interests and needs, and people feel committed to taking health improvements in their own hands + Local organizations and skills for ongoing development and problem solving are being developed. + Can target different social groups individually | - Time consuming especially in the first phases - The intensive collaboration and local flexibility involved places high demands on social and technical staff, who have to be prepared and capable of establishing longer term relationships with the community groups. - Need for flexibility in project planning and management - Large scale application appears to depend on the availability of well trained field and village workers, committed to and skilled in working with communities. |
| Public Health Communication Programmes | + The programme is easier to plan, manage and evaluate and integrate with technical activities, especially on a larger scale + Possible to reach large numbers of people in a short time and at a relatively low cost. | - Major limitation is that when people have the feeling that change in behaviours or conditions are imposed from outside, they may easily reject them - The approach can only be successful when changes advocated are relatively simple, correspond to the urgent needs of the people, and are easily within their means |
