Pakistan: Advocacy
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Advocacy and the Media
In Pakistan, like most other countries, media plays a crucial role in disseminating information on family planning and reproductive health. Through electronic and print media, government and private actors can distribute content in local languages as a public service announcements to reach the masses and create more awareness.
Media advocacy can help journalists and people in the media industry be more engaged in family planning and reproductive health issues by being more well-versed in the subject and disseminating messages in a variety of formats to diverse audiences.
What are the benefits of advocacy with the media?
Stories resonate with people and hence, topics like family planning and birth spacing can be shared with meaningful stories and metaphors. As a result, it’s important to engage media practitioners in advocacy efforts that:
- Strengthen journalists’ ability to spread accurate information in print, digitally, and on radio and TV about the benefits of family planning, which can help counter myths and misconceptions within the community.
- Build awareness of family planning issues within the context of the nation and community, helping to create public dialogue around family planning issues.
- Help influence policymakers and makes a case for a renewed commitment to family planning.
- Educate the general public about family planning, which can inspire them to hold their leaders accountable for the promises and commitments they make.
How to implement
Step 1: Perform a media stakeholder analysis
To conduct a media stakeholder analysis:
- Identify the family planning issues to explore, such as adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health (AYSRH), long-acting contraceptive methods, or male involvement.
- Prepare questions that will navigate you in the right direction.
- Feel free to include open-ended questions to assess knowledge and practice. You may also want to include statements for evaluating attitudes with which participants agree or disagree.
- Pretest your questionnaire (see this example questionnaire) among a group of journalists/media practitioners not participating in the survey, then modify the study based on their feedback.
- Survey media practitioners and analyze the results to inform your advocacy strategy.
Step 2: Identify critical media persons and begin engaging them
- Make sure to include media owners, managers, media executives and other influential players in the media, in addition to journalists.
- Conduct a series of visits with this group of media representatives to initiate working relationship(s) with them and solicit their support for increased reporting on family planning/reproductive health.
- Present the results of your stakeholder analysis to serve as the basis for the support that you are seeking from the media. It will also be essential to share your planned family planning activities in the community with them and recommend how the media can help report on them to support an enabling environment for family planning.
Step 3: Conduct a desk review of health reports
Select popular media organizations in your area (print, radio, TV and digital) and assess their health stories over some time. Look at both quantity (number) and quality (accuracy, depth) of the stories. This will give an overview of the health issues in your area and how the media is presenting them to the public. It will also allow you to learn the existing knowledge and dissemination strategies in place and find out what productions happen at those forums and engage with such producers and directors to create your content with them (such as dramas or web series), subject to the availability of funds.
Step 4: Develop training for media practitioners
- Determine which training topics are essential to cover with the media in your area. After your stakeholder analysis, meetings with media representatives and the desk review, you will have a good idea about gaps and topics the media may need training. For example, they might be regularly sharing misinformation about long-acting contraceptive methods.
- Develop training modules on family planning as it relates to the media. Modules can include topics such as:
- Effective reporting on family planning
- Linking family planning to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
- Family planning and economic development
- Conduct the training with key media houses and practitioners. For the training to be practical, include a range of media practitioners, including health reporters, education reporters, feature writers, on-air personalities and others.
- Maintain a database of trained journalists and engage them continuously.
Step 5: Organize a field trip to family planning sites
Showcasing your work can create a shift in mindset and resonate with the media practitioner. Media practitioners are generally visual and therefore visiting the community activities or a facility is helpful for them to better understand the work and be able to more effectively report on it. You can take journalists on field trips to family planning facilities in the community to help with effective reporting on family planning. It will help expose the media to live situations and scenarios and give them human-interest stories to use in their reports. Be sure also to invite photographers to document the work visually.
Step 6: Maintain regular communication with journalists to ensure adequate media coverage of family planning
- Identify a core person or a group of journalists who have a keen interest in reporting family planning issues. You could also select one of these journalists as your focal person, who can mobilize their colleagues as needed.
- Communicate regularly with this person or group of people about your project activities and any community or national family planning issues. With regular coverage of project activities, you can enhance journalists’ knowledge of reporting on family planning issues. This regular exposure will also help keep them up to date with the current trends, changes, facts and figures on family planning.
- Encourage media professionals to cover stories related to family planning regularly through routine interviews with women who have benefitted from family planning interventions or services, as well as men, community leaders, and others who support family planning.
Step 7: Encourage media to monitor family planning and AYSRH stories and policy and budget changes
- Monitor government commitments, policies, budgets and family planning indicators. You can update the media on these developments and include them in training sessions, seminars, conferences, stakeholders’ forums and other related events. You can also include media representatives in your community advocacy activities.
- Encourage journalists to provide supplemental information to your policy and budget tracking. For example, journalists can visit health care facilities to obtain first-hand information and generate stories for news reports and documentaries.
- Help develop the capacity of media professionals to monitor budgets and track the government’s spending on family planning. One way is to foster relationships between journalists and experts in budget monitoring and tracking who can provide insider information on whether or not the government is fulfilling its family planning commitments. You can do this by inviting the media to your Advocacy Working Group meetings to discuss budgets. You can then advocate for regular reporting on family planning budgets and encourage the media to support the production of budget documents for public access and distribution.
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Question 1 of 3
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What are the benefits of working with media to help them understand the importance of family planning?
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Strategies for working with media to advocate for family planning include which of the following:
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3. Question
It is better to focus all media efforts on traditional media (e.g., TV, newspapers and magazines) than social media to advocate for family planning.
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Pakistan Advocacy Interventions
Tips
- Be sure to include new media, such as social media (Facebook, Twitter and others), in your advocacy. Unlike traditional media such as radio, newspapers, TV and magazines, new forms of media can distribute information to a broad cross-section of audiences and are particularly important in understanding what messages are reaching young people.
- Encourage journalists to interview family planning clients, health care providers and others who work in family planning. These beneficiaries of family planning and frontline workers can help share first-hand experiences or testimonials, helping to put a “human face” to family planning issues that are often presented in the form of data, tables or charts.
- Develop real-life documentaries of the beneficiaries that showcase the situation in your community.
Challenges
- Ensure culturally sensitive language when reporting on family planning and reproductive health. This is important in the KAP assessment as well.
- Clergy could resist family planning advocacy efforts in your area or geography. As a result, they should be engaged to build their confidence related to your work.
- Like other stakeholders, media representatives can harbor misconceptions and incorrect information about family planning and may be reluctant to support family planning in the media due to sensitivities expressed by local opinion leaders. Thus, training media representatives is critical in reporting on family planning and the basics of family planning, and its importance to building healthy families, communities and societies.
- Moving from media to public discourse can sometimes be challenging. Encourage media personnel to cover key national and international days related to family planning, such as World Population Day, Safe Motherhood Week, World Breastfeeding Day and International Women’s Day. Securing appearances and interviews on these days can help generate public dialogue and discourse on family planning.
- Keeping content interesting can be difficult when family planning issues are covered regularly. To keep content fresh while encouraging consistent reporting, you can suggest that media professionals cover new and unreported developments as new evidence about family planning’s effect on the economy or the integration of family planning with other services.