Obulamu (How's Your Love Life?) Campaign

The integrated campaign platform is designed to roll out a series of health communication interventions to contribute to reducing HIV infections, total fertility, maternal and child mortality, malnutrition, malaria, and tuberculosis. It is based around life stages: family with children, adolescents, young people in relationships, and couples in longer term relationships, and is designed to encourage access to services and positive health-seeking behaviours.

"Instead of the traditional, prescriptive health messages that demand audiences to act (which they often don’t do), the OBULAMU campaign engages people in a conversational approach about their barriers to change, finds out what’s important to them and in their context and positions relevant health actions accordingly. This approach helps to break through the current message fatigue with the behavioural goal of addressing and overcoming known barriers to action for service utilization and household behaviors."

The first stage of the roll-out focuses on young people or adults in relationships. It is designed to improve the knowledge, motivation and risk perception, skills, norms and supportive environment of young adults so they can adopt relevant health behaviours around condom use, HIV testing and counselling, safe male circumcision, multiple sexual partner reduction, antiretroviral therapy adherence and discordance, pregnancy prevention, and tuberculosis testing and drug adherence. This phase supports community demand creation through radio, community shows, and television and dialogue meetings.

As part of the first phase, 42 radio stations across Uganda broadcast radio spots, DJ led conversations/mentions, health expert guest shows, and radio talk shows between December 2014 to April 2015. These will later be transitioned into messages for phase II, which focuses on pregnant women and their partners. The phase one radio shows will also include 150 Obulami Community Shows, which use edutainment to improve information/ knowledge, motivation/risk perception, skills, norms and supportive environment to adopt relevant health actions. In addition, two national TV stations (NTV Uganda and Bukedde TV) will air television spots daily during news segments between 7-10pm when most households are watching TV.

Another key component of the campaign is working with partners to orient 2,000 Obulamu Campaign Champions at community level. During orientation, champions are introduced to the Obulamu campaign, given relevant campaign tools, materials, and inter-personal communication skills to help them perform their duties of linking demand for, and supply of, available health services. For the campaign, CHC has produced and translated 'seed copies' of various print materials, including posters/billboards, stickers, talking points, a lovers passport, champions materials, among others. These materials are available in 18 local languages. Campaign partners are able to use and adapt the materials for their own activities.

The campaign approach and tools are all outlined in the Obulamu Campaign Implementation Guide. The other three phases, to be rolled out in 2015, address pregnant women and their partners, male and female caretakers of children under 5, and adolescent girls and boys. Each phase also addresses persons living with HIV and other key populations.

HIV/AIDS, Family planning, Malaria, Maternal and child health, Nutrition and TB