A Challenges of Adopting Local Visual Contents in Awareness Campaigns for Control of Communicable Diseases

This paper asserts that public awareness creation and raising (ACR) adopting local-visual-evidences (LVE) have already been established by studies as an effective health communication strategy that can be employed to alleviate the outbreaks of communicable diseases. The purpose of the paper is to establish the major challenges of effective implementation of this important risk communication strategy. This study was informed by relevant good practice, lessons learned, and the results of previous studies on awareness creation (AC) with a focus on communicable diseases in Nigeria. This review examined the probable prospects and challenges of adopting LVE-based AC contents to provide policymakers, public health, and safety agencies accessible information for effective decision-making options. The preliminary findings revealed that the use of LVE-based AC information services or contents is not favourable for the patients, their families, or friends when appropriate precautions are not taken. The same also applies to the government, public awareness communication campaigners or content designers, and their development partners or sponsors. However, the paper found that LVE-based public awareness communication campaigns would be effective in curbing the outbreaks of communicable diseases if effectively conducted at the community level. It is highly recommended that public awareness communication practitioners, governmental and non-governmental organisations, involved in communicable disease management and prevention, know that participatory community engagement leads to higher awareness for behaviour change. The study proposed a LVE Adoption Pattern to guide decision-makers in crisis situations.