Communication context of Roll Back Malaria and HIV and AIDS campaigns in Nigeria

Abstract

With malaria endemic and HIV and AIDS transmuting into a pandemic, the disease burden posed by the two have made them the focus of national and global attention. This necessitated a comparative scrutiny of the communication component of the Roll Back Malaria and HIV and AIDS programmes in Nigeria; and the environment and scenarios for communication interventions, with a view to assessing their effectiveness in addressing the need for sustainability and ownership. The analysis highlighted the potential of communication, which in programmatic language is often interchangeably used with its sub-sets which include advocacy, social mobilization and programme communication. While the trend of communication conforms to global templates for such interventions, continuing concerns about morbidity and mortality rates of both diseases despite deployment of enormous resources, personnel and competence, highlight gaps in the effectiveness of strategies and activities. There is a need to reconcile the logic of programme and institutional agendas, and minimum frameworks for achieving local stakeholders’ ownership for communication to successfully catalyze these programmes to achieve the targets of prevention, control and a general reduction of morbidity and mortality deriving from these diseases.