posted on 2018-02-12, 15:09authored bySolomon Panford
It is obvious that the provision of facilities without accompanying user education is likely to result in poor
usage and for that matter lack of maintenance which will aggravate the already precarious situation of having no
facility at all. At any rate, hygiene education is not done in a vacuum; it is facilitated by certain tools (materials and messages) in the form of visuals more especially when the audience or target is a rural community. If ‘meaning really lies in the mind of the receiver’ as the adage goes, then the involvement of the receiver is the design of the message being communicated, therefore becomes almost imperative. Meanwhile, one aspect of the communication process which is normally the reservation of the communicator, is ‘message design’. However for hygiene educational purposes,
this should not always be the case.
To communicate meaningfully, one has to study and know his audience very well. Hence, to be able to reach the rural community, we should be aware of certain salient characteristic features of the people.
History
School
Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering
Research Unit
Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC)
Published in
WEDC Conference
Citation
PANFORD, S., 1997. Message design for hygiene education. IN: Pickford, J. et al. (eds). Water and sanitation for all - Partnerships and innovations: Proceedings of the 23rd WEDC International Conference, Durban, South Africa, 1-5 September 1997, pp.336-339.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/