Community Health Guides: Making materials relevant, effective, and empowering

By: Zena Herman

Hesperian Health Guides is excited to join the CHW Central community in a conversation about developing materials for health education and training. We have been producing practical health manuals for over 30 years, starting with the publication of Where There Is No Doctor, and we’ve learned a lot in the process about how to make materials relevant, effective, and empowering. Some of the greatest insights have come from community health workers in the field who use, adapt, and translate our materials every day.

If you aren’t already familiar with Hesperian’s resources, please take a minute to explore our books and resources.

I am a project manager, editor, and writer at Hesperian and over the next month hope to share a bit about the principles we employ while developing our resources, and to discuss some of the challenges you face in creating your own materials for trainings and community education. Some topics that we can discuss in more detail over the next month are:

Knowing your audience and developing appropriate material
Choosing what to include
Ensuring clarity of language
Using illustrations effectively, and good design principles

Please let me know which of these (or other topics) you are interested in hearing more about.

In the last few years, Hesperian has begun exploring using new technologies to support health materials development, making it easier for others to use our content and adapt it for local needs. Our new Digital Commons has Hesperian content for free download in 26 languages, and features an image library with over 10,000 Hesperian images available online. It also hosts our Health Materials Workshop (in development), an online tool that enables easy adaptation to create your own flyer, pamphlet, or poster. As we continue to improve these tools, we would love to hear from you about what technologies you are currently using (if any) and what would be most useful to you in supporting your work.

Questions Hesperian Health Guides has for the CHW Central community:

What are your biggest obstacles or challenges in developing health materials?
Which of the topics listed above (or others) are you interested in discussing over the next month?
What are you using as your source of health information when you make your materials? Are any of you using Hesperian books to guide your materials?
What kinds of technologies are you using to create your health materials?

Zena Herman is the Project Coordinator for the New Where There Is No Doctor. She first started using Hesperian guides and making community-level health materials while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in West Africa. She is also involved in expanding the reach of Hesperian material digitally, and helped to develop Hesperian’s first mobile app. Locally, Zena works to make Health for All a reality by volunteering and training lay health workers at the Berkeley Free Clinic. She has been with Hesperian since 2006.