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State-of-the-art on-line materials database premiered
 CHL and
program partner Catalyst organized a one-day workshop for over
20 media professionals from El Minya on December 7 to introduce
them to the Ministry of Information-State Information Services
Health Materials Resource Center. It was the first time the
Resource Center opened its doors to the public, with the official opening scheduled for
early next year. Mr. Salah El Toukhy, Undersecretary with the
Ministry of Information and Executive Director of the SIS-IEC Center, took the opportunity to premiere the new on-line SIS Material Resources
Database.
The
group from El Minya has been meeting monthly for the past year
in media workshops organized by CHL program partner Tahseen.
Participants in attendance at the December 7th
workshop included officials from the Local Information Centers (LICs)
of the SIS, the Director of the El Minya Radio Station, local
journalists, and representatives from Upper Egypt’s Channel 7
TV. CHL works with the media as partners in the campaign to
improve the health of Egyptian families, and the Resource Center was presented as a tool for them to use to prepare their stories, whether
broadcast or print. The Resource Center demonstrated its state-of-the-art on-line database, where researchers and
others can access the thousands of print, audio, and visual
productions of the SIS and other Egyptian and regional health
programs. The archive can be accessed through a web address
currently under development, and searching for records on a
particular topic is as easy as typing in a keyword. Records and
searches are available in Arabic and English. Most print
materials are available in a PDF file, with permission from the
producer, and can be directly downloaded from the database. The
SIS database is linked to the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg
School of Public Health Media and Materials Database, a
world-wide health resource database.
CHL
staff presented the project strategy to provide background for
the “Sahatek, Sarwetek” (Your Health, Your Wealth)
campaign, a national multi-media health campaign that
seeks to empower family members to adopt healthy behaviors at
every stage of their lives. The slogan taps into a deeply held
cultural belief that health is a gift to be cherished and
protected. Two of the twelve
TV spots developed for the campaign were presented at the
workshop. The signature spot features a newlywed couple at their
wedding celebration on a Nile River boat, and
communicates the importance of health in the form of advice to
the newlywed couple from family members. The spot closes with
the jingle and slogan, Sahatek, Sarwetek. Participants
broke into small groups to prepare story treatments for health
behavior messages for press, TV, Radio, and interpersonal
communication audiences, and presented their ideas in a final
plenary session. |
