Case Study – Public health awareness

Reach a Hand Uganda (RAHU) is a youth centered organisation focusing on youth empowerment programs with an emphasis on Livelihoods & Skills Development, Behaviour Change Communication, Sexual Reproductive Health & Rights, and HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention.

Twitter is one of the most important social media tool for RAHU as media houses often pick up on the most trending hashtags. One campaign back in 2014 deliberately provoked a social media discussion around the age of sexual consent. Two members of RAHU staff were training a group of 15 young people aged 20-30 about the benefits of using social media. During the workshop they demonstrated the power of Twitter by setting up the hashtag #consentat14. The age of consent in Uganda is currently 18 but teenage pregnancy is prevalent, so the group asked provocative questions such as ‘Have parents failed their children in education about safe sex’ and ‘Has the government failed in promoting contraception.’ The hashtag had over 900,000 impressions and received interest from TV, Radio and newspapers including Urban TV and XFM.

More recently, The SautiPlus campaign has been developed by Reach A Hand Uganda to embrace the growing and innovative technologies in social media, radio and TV, mobile phones, print and digital media. These media are used to address sexual reproductive health and rights issues that affect young people in and out of school ranging from HIV/AIDS, relationships, life skills, teenage pregnancy, child marriage. As part of the campaign there is an App which has been designed to use minimal amounts of data.

In the film above, Ibrahim who is the Communications and Advocacy Manager at RAHU also discusses in the film how celebrities are used in Uganda to raise awareness of health issues. We will discuss celebrity humanitarianism more in the next Step.