Shortly after my success with malaria bed net distributions, I was given the dual role of “Communications Specialist” because I could take decent photos. And then once again I was thrown into the fire and asked to develop a communications strategy to help our program reach its beneficiaries with life-saving information. Our $283 million dollar program, might I add.

Oh, and here are a million dollars to do it. Go on now. Shoo. 

So once again, I figured it out (thank you Google). One thing I did remember from grad school was that in order to know how to speak to your beneficiaries, you needed to actually speak TO them. So that’s what I did. I headed out to the furthest reaches of the country where our project operated and my team and I held focus group discussions and interviews with everyone from the village mamans (like the ones pictured here) to the chief to the health center staff.

And we asked, “How would you like for us to speak to you?” The funny thing is that most people answer with the same old methods people have been using in their programs for a very long time because that’s what they know: radio, village meetings, print posters, etc. But there was this one lady who said, “Why don’t you host movie nights?”

And that’s what we did. We hosted 2,000 of them in four provinces for 700,000 viewers.

Bad. Ass.

Thank you village lady for your brilliance!

Magic 276/365, Maman Speak, Mutoto, Kasai Central, DRC