Entertainment-Education and Behaviour Change: An Impact Assessment of a Polio Documentary Film in Northern Nigeria

"Communication for polio eradication has been an integral part of the national effort to interrupt polio transmission in Nigeria."

Chima E. Onuekwe, author of this dissertation, explains that the communication approaches to polio eradication in Nigeria (one of the remaining few endemic countries) can be broadly categorised into advocacy, social mobilisation, and programme communication. The key objectives of the communication approaches are to sensitise and mobilise parents to embrace polio vaccination for children aged 0-59 months. Although, as Onuekwe explains, these efforts have yielded varied results across the country, cases of noncompliance to polio vaccination are still high - especially in northern states of Nigeria - which has led to continued polio transmission.

The aim of this study was to assess the impact of an entertainment-education documentary film for communicating polio vaccination to noncompliant households to accept polio vaccination and to recommend the methodology or suggest improvements in polio communication in Nigeria. A total of 1,688 participants randomly selected from the northern states of Nigeria participated in the study. The study adopted a field experimental survey to gather quantitative data and focus group discussion for qualitative data. Participants for the study were grouped into treatment (exposed to the documentary film on polio) and control (not exposed to the documentary).

Findings of the study from both the field experimental survey and the focus group discussion indicated that participants who watched the documentary film demonstrated better understanding of polio, developed a higher sense of knowing the severity of polio infection, and were more likely to accept polio vaccination than those who were not exposed to the documentary film.

Based on these findings, the study recommends that: (i) entertainment-education be adopted as an alternative communication strategy for impacting behaviours of noncompliant parents to accept polio vaccination in northern Nigeria; (ii) an active participatory communication approach be adopted for involvement of stakeholders at all levels of the polio eradication initiative; and (iii) a bottom-up communication approach be applied to engender a sense of ownership of polio programmes in the families and the community-at-large.

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