What do community outreach, mobilization and mass media programmes encompass?
Community outreach and mobilization can encompass a range of interventions and approaches, including: community meetings; training or sensitization sessions with traditional authorities, community or religious leaders; street theatre and other cultural activities and marches and demonstrations. Mass media campaigns normally use radio, television, billboards or other media to reach a wide segment of a community. It also offers individuals, especially young people, anonymous access to valuable information and resources without having to go through others they may not trust (e.g. doctors, teachers, etc.). Entertainment-education or ‘edutainment’, is a particularly useful strategy that entails the “process of purposely designing and implementing a media message to both entertain and educate, in order to increase audience members’ knowledge about an educational issue, create favourable attitudes, shift social norms, and change overt behaviour” (Singhal et al., 2004). Edutainment may have a
