ABSTRACT
This
study examines the effectiveness of communication strategies deployed
by the National Malaria Control Programme (NMCP) in fighting malaria in
Nigeria. Over the years, these strategies have been more diffusion-based
than participatory. Available documents indicate that the rate of
success in the fight against malaria as championed by the agency has not
been encouraging; leading to investigation of the reasons behind this
lackluster performance. Communication was singled out as a major
determinant of success for this project and this was investigated in
Sokoto and Kano States, where qualitative processes were applied to
assess the scope, depth and impact of the strategies employed through
data analysis conducted on the documents of the agency and others
relevant, in-depth interviews with four officials at state and local
government offices of the NMCP and field interviews with 40
beneficiaries of the intervention in the two states. The findings of the
study revealed that communication strategies play a key role in
planning development interventions, but that these communication
strategies need to be very effective to succeed. At the NMCP, it became
clear that primarily, the diffusion-based communication strategies
employed by the NMCP have not been very successful. This is because they
do not engage the beneficiaries of the programme, despite the desire of
the beneficiaries to have such engagement. Other secondary findings
include the revelation of an apparent lack of capacity in the area of
communication by officials and a template of activities that is skewed
more towards some aspects of the programme than others. As part of the
recommendations of this study, the need for the inclusion of
participatory approaches among the regime of strategies employed by the
NMCP was canvassed in order to establish the needed dialogue with
beneficiaries and add value to the overall performance of the Agency in
fighting malaria in Nigeria.